Television Review

Review: Horizon - The Nine Months That Made Me

2011-08-23T10:22:00.003+01:00

Horizon's hedonists' charter moved Mark Lewis to new health lows

The thing about The Nine Months that Made Me [Mmmmm]... the thing about The Nine [chomp]... The thing [munch]... I’m sorry, let me just finish eating this.

It doesn't matter folks

That’s better. I’ve just been so busy eating packets of deep-fried cigarettes that I’ve barely got time to speak. Since I finished watching Horizon’s the Nine Months That Made Me (Monday, 9pm, BBC2), I’ve just had this real hankering to treat my body really appallingly. I just smoked a cake.

But I’m one of the lucky ones. I have what Professor David Barker describes as a good constitution. "Clearly there are people with good constitutions who live long lives,” he says. “For them healthy lifestyles might not matter so much." Ace! I know I have a good constitution because, according The Barker Theory, there is a sliding scale of constitutional health which can be determined by your birth weight. Little babies have bad constitutions. They will be unhealthy adults. Big babies have good constitutions. They will be the kind of healthy adults who can eschew healthy lifestyles in favour of competitive eating.

If that sounds to you like a simplistically reductive analysis of lifelong health outcomes, then keep it to yourself will you? Since discovering that my baby weight was similar to that of an average Tongan rugby player, I have taken this programme for the hedonists’ charter it was presumably meant to be. As the voiceover man made clear, by the time we are born our health and our age are already largely determined. So all us parents can stop being so uptight as well.

"Parents have to deal with both sides of it,” says Janet DiPietro the most terrifyingly irresponsible developmental psychologist in the history of lightweight pseudoscience. “If your child turns out to be a happy child it's not your doing. But if your child turns out to be a difficult unhappy child, it's also not your doing." Fucking hell!

The rest of this “truly remarkable scientific project,” is spent shuffling off between India, The Netherlands, The US and Saudi Arabia to effectively tell us that good nutrition during pregnancy leads to healthier people. On the grand scale of scientific breakthrough, it is up there with: keeping your hands out of food blenders will leave you with a fuller complement of fingers.

Review: The House That Made Me: Michael Barrymore

2010-12-16T22:47:00.000Z

Michael Barrymore's retrospective is as selfish as it is chilling, says Mark Lewis

Maybe it is what made him such a compelling performer. But nine years after a young lad was found dead in his swimming pool with violent anal injuries, Michael Barrymore’s self absorption is ghastly.

In The House That Made Me: Michael Barrymore (Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm) his lack of empathy is as relentless as his self-pity. His bloated old cheeks forcing his eyeballs deep back inside his flesh; his brow furrowed by the years of frowning over his own misfortune, Barrymore does the Who Do You Think You Are bit with selfish gusto.

“My life would have been easier if I didn’t have to be gay,” he says. He goes back to a recreation of his childhood home: “Jumping inside your own life – that’s brave even for me.” The subtext is always the same: Something dreadful has happened to me. Why me? He died, but what about me? My dad was violent and fucked off when I was just 11. What about me? I was gay, growing up in South East London in the 1960s. Fuck him. Fuck that dead boy! What about me? What about me?

“Nine years after losing everything, Michael is going back to the beginning to find out where the problems began,” says the voiceover man, complicit in the sordid egocentricity.

“It’s like the night the guy died in my pool,” says Barrymore, “I know my part in it now.

“I’m not frightened to say now.

“My part was I didn’t say no. If I’d have been sober and together and had not thought you have to be good and nice to everyone, I’d have said you’re not coming back to my place”

Smirking: “I was trying to be popular and look what happened. I didn’t say no, you ain’t coming back.

“I was trying to be popular. That’s my part in it. I didn’t say no.”

Neither did Channel 4.

Review: Miranda

2010-12-01T14:30:00.001Z

Stripped of modern gimmicks, Miranda is as old fashioned as crinoline and a shampoo and set, yet still manages to capture single womanhood in 2010 perfectly says Trudi Parton

It shouldn't work but it does. BBC2's Miranda, (Monday, 9pm) following the romantic escapades of the exceedingly tall and exceedingly funny Ms Miranda Hart doesn't have any particular structural quirks to set it apart. There's no first person camera thing like Peep Show. There's nothing like that football commentator thing they do in Pete Versus Life. It's not shit like Two Pints of Lager And a Packet of Crisps. It just has a solid script and great comedy performances.

Miranda works in a shop with her girlfriends and spends a lot of time in the neighbouring restaurant where the object of her affections, Gary, works as a chef. This week's episode focuses on Miranda and Gary's doomed attempts to get it on, despite a brace of lecherous would-be suitors, one of whom just happens to be one of her pal's fiance.

So far, so terribly old school one might think. Hell, it even has canned laughter and Miranda talks to camera - yes like Ferris Bueller does in his Day Off. But why should sit coms have to have gimmicks, when they are as charming as this, and deal with the dating dilemmas that face the modern-day Bridget Joneses (yes it was that long since the books). After all, overbearing mothers and smug marrieds never really go away do they?

Miranda and Gary's first date doesn't go well, though they do have velour-covered menus in the restaurant 'you know you're somewhere posh when they look like a smoking jacket' says Miranda. Quite. After a dessert-based fire, they then decamp to Miranda's pad where the moment is killed by a bout of indigestion and the word 'Wind-eze'.

Then, after a botched session of al fresco bonking, afternoon delight ruined by leg wax stuck to the bath and a denouement that ends up with nearly everyone naked, 'It's just like a French farce' mugs Miranda, our unlucky in love couple never make it past first base. And then it's time for the credits to roll with the announcement that 'You Have Been Watching' (yes, like they used to do in Dads Army and Hi-De-Hi!) and another thirty minutes of shamelessly underrated sit com draws to a close. No doubt the BBC will pull it like Pulling, so enjoy it while you can.

Review: I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here

2010-11-28T23:21:00.002Z

I'm a Celebrity remains the best reality show on TV, despite turning us all into callous POW camp guards, says Mark Lewis

The cruelty on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here started off like a Japanese game show. It has become like a Japanese concentration camp.

Shit inspecting demon

At the beginning, eating bugs used to be a rarity; an uber-trial late on in the programme which separated the men from the boys, then made them all eat mashed up cockroaches anyway. Now in its ninth year, eating bugs has become something the celebrities have to do just for the authorisation to take a shit.

This weekend, (Saturday and Sunday, 9pm, ITV1) a vast woman called Alison from Birmingham and a Playboy bimbo with a voice so grating she makes you want to dip your ears in a food blender, had to keep live insects the size of Hugh Hefner in their mouths for twenty seconds, while two Geordies who used to be PJ and Duncan shouted numbers from the sidelines. Had he still been alive, Commander Tatsuji Suga of the Batu Lintang POW camp would have been taking notes. And wanking like teenager.

But IACGMOOH nevertheless remains the most compelling of reality shows. Perhaps it is because you know it will only last three weeks. Perhaps it is because once you have abandoned every concept of human decency and bought into the spiteful voyeurism, you may as well enjoy it. Most of all it is because Ant, Dec et al have completely nailed the concept. Voting to keep a person in, rather than voting to kick them out, guarantees the monsters remain and the dullards go. Gillian McKeith – a woman described by Jenny Eclaire as “a ghastly creature. Ghastly!” and Shaun Ryder as “an ‘orrible, nasty fucker,” remains. “Lovely rock,” Cheryl Gascoigne (a woman so nice that had she been chief of Northumbria police, would have let erstwhile husband, Paul, have a crack at talking down Raoul Moat with a fishing rod and six beers that time) was the first to go.

Lembit (Limp Bizkit) Opik, Alison Vast, and Britt Eckland have all followed.

So as we go into the final week, here are the Television Review odds on the probably victor:

Gillian McKeith: So poisonous she teaches wickedness classes to Mephistopheles and his evil hoards, and on Saturday night, forced Ryder into such a state of tautological incandescence that he screamed at her, “not only are you full of bullshit, you’re a lying bullshitter.” Could cast a spell to force a victory.

150-1

Aggro Santos: Tremendously tedious. But with the idiot charm of a simpleton. “Do I look like a Korean?” asked fat Caucasian, Dom Joly on Sunday night. “I don’t know man,” replied Santos.

90-1

Kayla Playboy: Voice like a corkscrew drilling into your brain. But showed some mettle. And some cleavage. Unlikely victor still.

30-1

Dom Joly: funny favourite. Masterful liar, and unapologetic bastard.

Evens

Stacey X-Factor: Unpretentious, surprisingly sharp, big-chested, supposed dim-wit. Joint favourite

Evens

Shaun Ryder: Innate decency, and charming bumbling of a cleaned up drug-nut, could see him walk out in the crown. Might end up killing McKeith, though, and see him dragged out in a police van.

2-1

Linford Christie: Extreme masculinity make his trials dull to watch. Body of a god, despite being 50. Very scared of cold water.

20-1

Jenny Eclair: Good value comedienne. Could do quite well. But not as funny as Dom, or nice looking as Stacey.

12-1

Review: River Monsters

2010-11-23T23:29:00.010Z

River Monsters? Well, there is a river, says Saul Sherry

Monsters!

“I’m Jeremy Wade, Biologist and Extreme Fisherman.” And so begins River Monsters (Tuesday, ITV1, 7:30pm) in the midst of a flashback to something which hasn’t happened yet. There’s nothing there, just Mr Extreme Fisherman desperately trying to build a reason to paddle around on a boat.

To be fair to the Intense Angler, the boat is on the Congo. It’s not his first time here either, as he alludes to throughout the show. Years ago he searched unsuccessfully for a mythical fish so big it would drag unsuspecting fishermen to the their deaths. “Me and this river have some unfinished business”, Wade declares. At this point, we all realise that River Monsters is a documentary in the way that a jelly bean is a functioning human kidney.

Or is it? Suddenly he is delving into the heart of Africa, areas of mineral richness which have been exploited by Europeans, leading to extreme poorness. But no, it’s an associative game. Poorness leads to toughness, meaning that Wade the Zealous Gill Killer is tough. He’s the Chuck Norris of angling. The Ross Kemp of Rex Hunt’s world.

Next thing you know he is poking around with a small half-dead catfish. Clearly a true Extreme Fisherman. “Toothed Lungfish,” he says, fingering someone else’s catch again. “Looks like it could eat a fish.” Clearly not lying about the Biologist bit either.

All this fish talk isn’t just boring me, as Captain Scale Smotherer switches again to how violent life can be. Every time he mentions how weird something is, we are treated to a burst of X-files wobbly light effects. Suddenly fish hooks are flying off the side of the boat and embedding themselves in flesh (or cloth, probably). Blood splatters across wood, it is gratuitous. Gratuitously shit.

“I’m in the Congo, searching for a giant catfish,” he reminds us. Which sums it up, really. He’s also making out this normal fishing village out to be something from the Heart of Darkness. When the fish does arrive, its an anticlimax because you are expecting Marlon Brando to pop out of the water with cotton wool stuffed in his cheeks.

Well, it’s not just that. It’s also the fact that the fish he catches aren’t huge at all. He lands two normal size fish, but is quick to point out that “two fish can mean double the power.” Extreme Fisherman, Biologist and now Physicist, it would seem.

Turns out there is no big fish, it’s just people getting snagged on their own hooks. Less River Monsters and more Angling Safety Tips, I think.

Reviews: Coppers and Panorama

2010-11-22T22:48:00.002Z

Wakefield's police are about as bright as a broken 40 watt bulb, says Mark Lewis

Authoriteh

At just 25 years old, PC Phillipa Child already has four years' experience dealing with Wakefield’s pub and bar detritus. It hasn’t gone to waste. Using all her experience and humbling policing skills on Coppers (Monday, ITV1, 9pm) the young hotshot quickly got to the bottom of one high street distraction. “I think she’s probably had too much to drink,” she says. On reflection, the signs were there: The hang-headed screeching, the fingers down the throat, the vomit in the hair. But it took PC Child to put a name on the symptoms.

And she was only the brightest of West Yorkshire’s finest detectives. The programme opened with one of her more satirical colleagues shouting, “booyakasha, this is my car!” at the camera, cleverly appropriating pseudo-Caribbean patois in a parody of assumed police contempt for black culture.

“I love nicking people,” he says later. “If I could, I would just nick people all the time.”

“I’ll kick him in the bollocks,” observes another.

“It’s coppers as you’ve never seen them before,” says the voiceover, imagining that the old bill the general public run into are the ones emerging from seminars on nuclear physics, rather than the ones saying, “you’re not telling me to suck your cock,” to quicker witted drunks telling them to “suck my cock.”

And that, it occurs to me, is exactly the kind of discourse we should be exporting to the Middle East. According to Panorama (BBC1, 9pm) there are “faith schools” in the UK which are using Saudi Arabian textbooks to teach British Muslims un-British lessons about Jews and homosexuals.

In the spirit of cultural exchange, how about we send our own textbooks back to Saudi Arabia? Sure, it’s fairly offensive hearing that British kids are being taught that homosexuals should be killed, and Jews metamorphose into monkeys and crabs. But it is hard to imagine Al Ekhbariya TV not being equally appalled at discovering a Tricolore 4a textbook with a scene from La Rochelle where school kids have scrawled ill-proportioned speech bubbles out of the mouth of Pierre, telling Claude to “suck my circumcised cock.”

Review: All Star Family Fortunes

2010-11-22T00:52:00.011Z

Family Fortunes is an idiot’s paradise, but is it harder to hate when done for charity? Saul Sherry investigates

Where Family Fortunes once had an assured place in the UK world of four to five channels, it holds an odd position now among the neon stimulant driven miasma of other, equally bland quiz shows.

In an effort to breathe life in to a stale format, the intros are edited quickly. Also really badly, and on a shoe-string budget. One family live in a London semidetached. This is the family of celebrity Heather who has really made her name on Harry Hill’s TV Burp (she’s also an Eastender, apparently.) She’s introduced with the opportunity to show off her Donald Duck impression, it’s quite good really, considering the spasmodic entertainment abortion which is coming up. The other family lives in a castle in Dublin. They are the owners of a celebrity Boyzone. Not that one who’s name you know. Their introduction is notable for the fact that his wife and sister are identical. Apparently it is also worth telling us that he owns an 11 inch telescope.

Vernon seems more pleased to see this one. “It’s Mikey from Boyzone!” he screams to camera. “FROM DUBLIN!”. Then the questions are asked, and nothing here has changed in the Fortunes fomula. “Name someone you would not expect to hear swearing,” says Kay. You. You personality fuck void. The castle dwellers quickly establish themselves as being superior to the ones from the normal house, and to compensate Heather unleashes Donald Duck again. Vernon laughs, the audience laugh, the Boyzone laughs.

At the point where Vernon is asking, “what would you do with your trousers when not wearing them?”, short of hearing something like “put them in a furnace to get rid of the evidence”, I challenge anyone to maintain complete interest in what’s going on on screen. Things perk up in the name gender reversal round, where a woman called Lesley competes against a man called Fran to think up another word for ‘big’. This is the point where the Eastender and her family start to show how shit at this game they really are. Turns out the top answer is ‘large’. Who would have guessed? For leaving the game without scoring any points, Heather gets £1,000 pounds for her charity of choice. It makes slagging the show off a little tiny bit more difficult. It doesn’t really, it just gives me something else to write down.

“BIG MONEY!!!” squeals Vernon, as a way to allude to the oncoming final round. First question: Name a way of getting across a river. I lean across to my girlfriend, “what channel is this on?” I ask. Without looking at the screen she replies, “channel shitbags” (Saturday, ITV1, 6.30pm). We are looking forward to having kids.

When it is all over, Boyzone starts to rip his brother for having said February in response to the question “name a month with 31 days”. He himself answered September.
All in all they won around £6,000 for their charity. Which is good, it really is. It’s amazing. I just wish they would donate the money directly. And add in Vernon’s wage, the studio costs and all the advertising revenue.

Review: Sarah Beeny's Restoration Nightmare

2010-11-18T22:15:00.003Z

Sarah Beeny's latest show is so interminably self-indulgent it is practically perverted, says Mark Lewis

A mix up at Channel 4 would have
made the show more tolerable

It is hard to conceive of a programme more tedious than a Sarah Beeny-presented hour-long show about restoring Sarah Beeny’s own 97-bedroom stately home in East Yorkshire. But Sarah Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare (Wednesday, Channel 4, 8pm) manages it by being the first of a three part series about restoring Sarah Beeny’s own home presented by Beeny and her even more dreadful husband, Graham.

‘The Queen of TV restorations’ is going to have eat her own medicine or somesuch, we are told. It is the equivalent of Gillian McKeith poking through her own shit, disturbing an insect, contracting Malaria, then getting a course of fake antibiotics from a bogus GP. Only a lot less fun. It’s difficult to imagine the agony of having to project-manage an East Yorkshire, stately home restoration from a second home in West London. But somehow Sarah and Graham are going to have to push through the pain. (It puts the cuts in benefits to alcoholic, disabled, Glaswegians into proper perspective.)

And that is just one element of the torture. They also have to deal with a film crew hanging around to take whimsical shots of them standing by their new lake, and three hours’ worth of a voiceover man saying ad infinitum that Sarah Beeny has got a big, crumbly, stately home which needs restoring cheaply, and in just six months. The irony of filming Sarah and Graham choosing sinks for five minutes before yawning and complaining to each other that choosing sinks is “so boring,” is evidently lost on the pair.

They are like Jeeves and Wooster, without Jeeves. Or any humour. So removed are they from the misery of every day British life that George Osborne fancies them a little aloof. Sarah’s brother, Dicken, is actually married to Graham’s sister, Dickette. Even the Royal Family can’t manage that level of gene management anymore.

And the whole time we have to keep swallowing this clock-ticking conceit, without the voiceover man even once shouting, “you’ve had the house for ten years, you stupid posh bint. Why the fuck do you need to get it finished in the next six months?” It is like Sixty Minute Makeover for nobs called Dicken from Notting Hill.

It would take a heart of stone not to want them to fail. But the existence of this programme, makes the possibility vanishingly remote. Despite the six-month deadline, you know that Graham’s lifelong dream of being just a little wealthier is going to come true.

“Graham has dreams and I make them happen,” says Beeny at one point. “It’s a dangerous partnership.” With a show as interminable as this one it is impossible not to ponder just how far this dangerous partnership of dream-making bastardry goes. It usually ends with Graham’s mouth being too muffled to utter the safety word, and dying with a noose around his neck Caradine-style in a locked cupboard full of oranges and old roof tiles.

But even that wouldn’t be worth watching the next two episodes for.

Review: Delia Through the Decades

2010-01-12T00:05:00.004Z

The witchcraft of delia has somehow kept her on our screens for forty years, says Mark Lewis

“If I’d have been born in Medieval times I would have been burned at the stake without any doubt,” says Delia. And who can question our black-toothed, first Millennial, fanatical ancestors? If anyone in Britain is a friend of the broomstick it’s Delia Smith.

So compelling a mage is she that, rather than just some tedious, old, frumpy, sexless aunt, her adversaries invest her with almost Godlike abilities. “When she showed us how to boil an egg, egg sales went up 10% or something,” says Rick Stein. “That’s power – real power.” It isn’t Rick. Real power is atomic weaponry or the ability to complete a Rubik’s cube. And in his heart of hearts even Rick knows it.

But her mysterious abilities blind us to her otherwise fantastical banality. In Delia Through the Decades (Monday, BBC2, 8.30pm) she has even persuaded TV to make a retromentary about her life as it weaves from the rations of the fifties through the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, and ever forwards towards contemporary Britain. In five parts!

Fuck! We’re only a fifth of the way towards reliving that time she got smashed at a Norwich City game and made a massive fucking arse of herself. And still we watch. Because despite the interminably chirpy Stephen Fry voiceover, who gives us our meaningless 12-minute commentary on twenty years of post war Britain with that air of almost-ironic sincerity which has infected our TV screens as disasterously as AIDS. And, despite having to learn about her former career as a swimwear model, as if our evolutionary urge for lust is useful when its object doesn’t even have any sex organs. And despite even having to endure the gratuitous views of Delia’s home and her vast husband, there is just something about Delia. She’s disgusting but utterly compelling like biting your own toenails.

How else to explain that following the cookery interludes between the dull-as-Delia commentaries on her show, the only thing preventing you from cooking up your own lemon soufflé omelette flambé is the absence in your kitchen of lemon, eggs, a whisk or a saucepan?

Review: Generation XXL

2010-01-04T22:35:00.004Z

C4's longitudinal study of fat kids is cynical and expoitative, says Mark Lewis

“When so many of our children are so big what does it really feel like to be growing up fat” asked the disembodied voice of some presumably chiselled porn Adonis on Generation XXL (Monday, 9pm, C4). “A long-term programme of research about obese children” was how it was billed like making it a longitudinal study somehow gives it intellectual purchase. As if it were a deconstruction of the third Reich as it related to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche rather than an excuse to have a tut at the parents of some fat kids.

“Eeeh, look at her! No wonder he’s fat. God. Size of that one… Eating chips ‘n all.” The compulsion to patronise the poor, fat, northern slobs, buying clothing from Sports Direct, for their sedentary kids, is almost overwhelming. “I’m doing the cooking,” said one mum. “How is it my fault? It always falls back on me. It’s very hard on me.” The abject selfishness is almost jaw dropping enough to fit in all the oil soaked victuals she is serving up to her kids.

But the stupidity of the parents is even more likely to send you into spasms of po-faced paroxysms. “I were upset for her. I could see it were getting bad,” said one dad of the bullying his daughter was getting at school, as if parading her in front of three million self-righteous voyeurs on Channel 4 on a programme called Generation XXL was going to starve the bullies of material somehow.

As dopy as the parents, and as unpleasant as judging the parents is, it is not nearly as risible as the programme makers whose cynicism in subjecting the children to the public eye with their faux air of concern is more toxic than a Frey Bentos pie. Filming a ten year old girl gazing confusingly around at the saggy old ladies at a Weightwatchers weight loss group, then giving Weightwatchers the heads up so it could advertise during the commercial break is hardly the height of Reithian public service. And the concern of the narrator as he intones solemnly about the struggles of being a chubby child is about as authentic as one of its eponymous chocolate bars.

But really the innocent remarks of the nine and ten year old children reveal why this programme - however sympathetic its representation of them is - is so self-servingly cruel. “My worst worry was to get picked on and lose friends because of it,” said one poor girl. “At school it has really been getting worse.”

And when the sweetest, most likeable, boy in Britain says “I think of myself as Jake the fat boy who gets bullied,” perhaps it is time to switch it off.

Review - Celebrity Big Brother

2010-01-03T23:35:00.008Z

The end is nigh for the voyeur's programme which suffered the indignity of not being watched, says Mark Lewis

And so the beginning of the end of the show that uncovered a semi-retarded chubby bird who called a tedious Indian girl a “Popadom or Boubadoop” and died. What will we do without the water by the chat machine, the shameful midnight epiphanies watching stupid people sleep on E4, and the moments of national catharsis when Britain collectively gets together and says fuck you John McCririck? And fuck your Diet Coke.

The Celebrity Big Brother (Sunday, C4, 9pm) opening show lost no time in reminding us why it will be the first programme of the last series. Big Brother’s defining characteristic as it lapsed into insignificance in the latter half of the decade, was not how desperate the contestants were becoming, but how desperate the show was. It was, we were told all those years ago, an important sociological experiment. Maybe it had been. Certainly, it was one of the defining television programmes of the Naughties; a founding father of the voyeur’s decade. Now it is reduced to hooking up a kitchen to look like “an autopsy room” and poking fun at Christianity.

Davina McCall, gurning as usual in front of a legion of baying morons, shouted about how this CBB was going to be more evil and invasive, how there would be even more cameras and how [gurn, laugh hysterically] the contestants would be woken up by the sound of a shrieking clown. So desperate to shock has Big Brother become that she could have said there was going to be an in-bog, shit-cam to see which of the celebrities had the most unbleached arsehole, and nobody would have been surprised.

As it was, the ten no-marks, half-marks and question-marks were paraded in front of the baying morons and cheered or booed like circus freaks. “Welcome to the new BB house,” said Davina. “It’s been given a makeover to make sure the celebrities have one hell of a time.

“Hell is a real place,” replied first contestant, Stephen Baldwin, who we now know is the co-host of an evangelical Christianity radio show, and crazier than the crazy character he played in The Usual Suspects “I plan on being a representation of the light of truth.”. From then we were invited to laugh again and again at how funny religion is. "I wonder what our born again Baldwin is doing," she gurned at one point.

“But what,” she asked introducing the next contestant, “would an evangelical Christian make of a naked page 3 model?” I don’t know Davina. What would a cat make of a mouse? What would a Millwall fan make of a West Ham fan? What would Mullah Omar make of Arial Sharon if he’d just drawn a picture of the prophet Mohammed on the Turin Shroud?

In its desperation to poke fun and set up conflict, the Big Brother producers have forgotten the humanity which gave the show at times its Shakespearean pathos and joy. The unrequited love story between Anthony and Craig did not happen because the contestants were made to go without food for a few hours. Shilpa bullies, Danielle Lloyd and Jo, the hideous one out of S Club 7, did not get voted out because their fags were taken away. And Nick did not smuggle in a pencil because of sleep deprivation. These things did not happen because of the producers’ manipulation. They happened despite it.

Who’s in and the televisionreview odds.

Stephen Baldwin – creepy religious loony (cheered). 15-1

Nicola T – unspeakably awful tit-statue (booed) 20-1

Alex Reid –Jordan squeeze who tried to aggressively push the sliding doors into the house (booed) 200-1

Stephanie Beacham – desperate to be recognised former Dynasty bitch (cheered) 12-1

Lady Sovereign but most people call her Sov – rapping adolescent (confused silence) 6-1

Cisqo – thong obsessed formerly famous R&B songster (sang decade old hit and was cheered) 4-1

Dane Bowers – former Jordan boyfriend and Alex Reid New Year’s Eve punch bag (cheered) 7-1

Heidi Fleiss – former Hollywood madam and cosmetic surgery warning poster (booed) 12-1

Jonas Altberg AKA Basshunter - Swedish Tourette’s sufferer and terrible pun man (half-heartedly cheered as they tried to remember if they’d heard that song he did) 8-1

Katia Ivanova – 20-year old artist and model. Definitely not famous for having relationship with geriatric Ronnie Wood (booed) 250-1

Vinny Jones – Vinny Jones (cheered) 3-1

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2009-02-22T18:38:00.003Z

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Review: Backstairs Billy - The Queen Mum's Butler

2009-02-03T17:28:00.004Z

Disptaches' Queen Mum documentary was about as revealing as a Victorian mourning dress, says Mark Lewis

Backstairs Billy – The Queen Mum’s Butler (Monday, Ch4, 9pm) was a Dispatches special which revealed nothing much more than that the royal family are about as relevant as an amputated wisdom tooth.

Alas, this dire, hour-long look at the court of the Queen Mother was equally pointless. The life of deceased footman, William Tallon, a servant every bit as queenly as the woman he was waiting on, had been pieced together with interviews with some old friends and one or two anodyne letters. As an insight into the royal family or the Queen Mother it was like speculating about Manchester United’s latest team sheet by reading the shopping list of Alex Ferguson’s mum’s hairdresser.

The programme kicked off by intoning coquettishly that “this is the butler who saw it all,” but ended by admitting apologetically that “he was a one-off who took many of his secrets to the grave.” What we were left with was a fact-shy, hour-long documentary about some chap.

He had been sympathetically dubbed Backstairs Billy by the press because of his position as unofficial Lord of the backstairs of Clarence house. Yes, in the same way as Fleet Street might describe someone as Sperm-Swallow Steve because of his uncanny resemblance to a whale and a garden bird!

But even with the playfully hilarious homophobia, the story failed to be in any way engaging. Backstairs Billy was flamboyant but he was not, according to best friend, Reta, camp. Admittedly, in the world of Reta, you had to be dressed in arseless leather chaps and a Nazi tunic to be considered in any way camp.

But this was nevertheless a poor attempt at intrigue. The “scandals” involving Billy amounted to changing clean forks for dirty ones, and wheeling Princess Margaret out to the gates of Clarence house on the 100th Birthday of the Queen Mum. The press should have been enjoying the parade which included some the Queen Mum’s favourite TV characters. Instead they spotted that her elderly daughter was looking fairly ill.

The real scandal, surely, was that Lizzie had made a bunch of soldiers dress up as Wombles.

Review: Autumnwatch

2008-10-27T22:54:00.004Z

Autumnwatch is so British it might as well be smashing up a Belgian piazza, says Mark Lewis

It’s a programme so parochial it makes you want to turn off your TV*, drink a pint of regional bitter in your local pub, and have a bit of a cry over a 1st class postage stamp.

It has that weirdly British combination of impossible ambition and a cosy lack of any at all. Making it live flies so far up the nose of every notion of good natural history programming procedure that it is almost laughably industrious. But then they front it with a man wearing a fleece.

And then make that man Bill Oddie.

Autumnwatch (Monday, BBC2, 8pm) is dripping in British peculiarity. Only in Britain could we imagine that we could somehow sex up the natural history format by inserting the interminably geriatric twittering of man who was incomprehensibly popular 40 years ago. Only in Britain would his meandering verbal links, which invariably wander into the next segment, be considered comforting. And only in Britain would a barn in Brownsea Island in Dorset truly be considered “glamorous”.

This is primetime telly. And yet in one segment, Oddie is allowed to take his camera down to Hampstead Heath to film ducklings frolicking on his local pond. Had it been in Italy, a man in a sparkling suite would have been hiding in the pond on Hampstead Heath filming Bill Oddie being fellated by a dancing girl.

But this is not a programme which will be sold overseas. The only thing likely to be cheered in the United States are the forcefully anthropomorphic reminders of how much tougher the North American grey squirrel is than the rather more effete British red.

The sense of British inferiority is so palpable that Oddie might as well stop stumbling through presenting a live nature programme and start comparing his love making skills with Giacomo Casanova.

Even the brief flicker of excitement at the hint of ‘good ol’ British’ bedroom deviance is quickly extinguished when we discover that “rutting stags” is something to do with fighting deer. Admittedly the rutting stags proved to be a fairly compelling, dramatic piece of television.

But only by British standards. Had it been in America, the stags would have been shooting one another with big fucking laser beams.

*Sentence could equally stop here

Review: Dispatches: The Trouble with British Airways; and Wired

2008-10-13T22:14:00.004+01:00

Dispatches was lightweight. ITV's latest drama was surprisingly heavyweight, says Mark Lewis

Dispatches: The Trouble with British Airways (Monday, Channel 4, 8pm) highlighted what I have now discovered to be The Trouble with Consumer Documentaries.

Why is it, I wondered, that I almost invariably take the side of big business in the consumer disputes contained within them? Could it be that the neat corporate PR which bedevils me whenever the ad breaks are on, has blinded me to the ills of the companies’ crimes? Perhaps. But marriage-threateningly incessant channel hopping has almost eliminated their power. Is it some idealised vision that everyone – even big companies - means well, really? Maybe. But really, I’m not that nice.

Of course! the trouble with consumer documentaries is that the case studies they unearth are invariably so objectionable.

I know it’s not right that I take arms against the underdog. If I deconstruct my reasoning, I’m aware that it doesn’t quite stack up. I know that, if wronged, a person should not have to write 18 letters of complaint just to get fair compensation for his loss.

But really! What sort of person writes 18 letters of complaint?

British Airways loses more baggage than any other European airline, it cancels more flight than any European flag carrier save for Luxembourg, Croatia and Greece.

And it is impossible to feel fiscal sympathy for a company so big that it can swallow a £121m fine for colluding to fix prices with Virgin Atlantic.

Nevertheless, it is impossible not to take its side when your thoughts on the underdog range between indifference and contempt.

One woman, who had her bag lost, and was sent £250 for her trouble, wrote a letter to the chief executive accusing him of theft. And was utterly incredulous that the company should close the case of her missing bag after a mere 90 days of searching. How could they stop looking for her bag after a mere three months when they kept on looking for the Yorkshire Ripper until they found him?

Andrew Gilligan – as desperate to sex up this documentary as he was to accuse Alastair Campbell of sexing up that Iraq dossier – does his best. He even goes to the lengths of interviewing Scootch, Britain’s cabin-crew-themed novelty entrants to the 2006 Eurovision song contest, with Flying the Flag, for some reason.

But to no avail. The problem, really, is that the trifling inconveniences of ordinary people just don’t merit the hour long honour of as primetime Dispatches programme.

The same – and I find it hard to believe that I am writing this – cannot be said of the latest ITV drama, Wired (Monday, ITV1, 9pm). As strange as it is to report, ITV has produced a programme with pace, intrigue and passable performances from the whole cast.

The bad guy is suitably nasty. (He runs a club so exclusive that it has a French name and a long queue in the middle of the day). The main protagonist is attractive and engaging. And the set up is pleasantly smooth.

All of which risks damning with faint praise. But with two more instalments still to come, the channel which just keeps on bringing you X-Factor, has ample time to mess it up.

Reviews: Age of Terror - The War on the West; Natural World - Spectacled Bears; Amy Winehouse - What Really Happened

2008-05-06T23:19:00.008+01:00

Three documentaries of spectaculary different scope served up fear, concern and contempt says Mark Lewis

If you think that making fun of a marmalade-munching, raincoat-wearing, geriatric, tube-tramping, imaginary, vagrant bear isn’t funny, then try finding a joke in The Age of Terror – the War on The West (Tuesday, BBC2, 9pm). Beyond, say, spreading the rumour that Osama Bin Laden is gay. Or Jewish. There is very little humour to be found in the last of this impeccably researched four-part documentary series. (Or a transsexual).

The story of the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, just weeks after Bin Laden sat in front of a video camera and said US target would be hit soon, is a tale of missed opportunities and appalling morality. The maimed, blinded, weeping people with crippled bodies and ruined lives tell a spectacularly morbid tale.

Let us just hope that this most modern and merciless form of terror will fade out as surely as those which the series maker, Peter Taylor, has already shown preceded it.

At around 50 years old Bin Laden, like Paddington Bear, should be reaching about the right age for gentle removal from our memories and popular consciousness.

Paddington has been around for over 50 years. But like the Peruvian, Spectacled bear on which he is based, Paddington is less popular today than he was.

Even in my day, Paddington was little loved. In the 1950s he only had to compete with grainy Pathe film clips of Fidel Castro speeches and powdered egg rations. But by the 1980s Ronald Reagan and The Thundercats had come along.

It was a daft, thoughtless time. I regret to say that as a pre-pubescent boy, I didn’t even think about the anthropomorphic implications of there only being one female on the Thundercats planet. Or that she was a different species from the only males. It’s difficult and terrifying to imagine the progeny of a half woman/half cheetah and a half man/half panther.

But not nearly as difficult, apparently, as the thought of a bear eating a cow. This was the sub-text of the first in this series of Natural World (Tuesday BBC2, 8pm), where belligerent, biologists dismissed the eye witness accounts of Andean locals with eye wateringly colonial disdain. But, despite the patronising certainty of one biologist, Rob Williams, that the bear eats nothing meatier than tree bark and marmalade, we actually see footage of Paddington gorging on a cow.

The problem is that proof that this endangered species is a carnivore might make him very unpopular indeed. And this – as tedious though this programme largely was - is the nub. The spectacled bear is so cute, and Steven Fry narrates with such gently, aching concern that you’d really rather they weren’t shot. So given that saying what really happened could get these buggers killed, how about we just agree that what really happened was we saw the Peruvian spectacled bear eating nothing worse than a ratatouille?

It would be no less improbable than the latest in Jacques Perretti’s What Really Happened series. Amy Winehouse – What Really Happened (Channel 4, 9pm) followed the standard trajectory of Perretti conducting telling interviews with in-the-know interviewees so far out of the know that quotes from Dr Raj Persaud would have looked like a coup.

Hold the front page! Journalist, Sophie Hayward tells us Amy's not very good at accepting compliments. Exclusive! Journalist, Gordon Smart explains husband, Blake, is not very popular on Fleet Street. Scoop! 'Friend', Joe Mott who last saw Amy when The Thundercats were popular, says Amy is partial to a hit on the crack pipe.

At least Perretti has the decency to preface everything he says with, 'it seems to me.' 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that it was about this time that her life began to change.' 'It seems to me,' he goes on, 'that her fantasy has become a reality.'

It seems to me, that What Really Happened is a fanciful name for an hour of strung together library shots.

Reviews: Dispatches Undercover, Embarrassing Bodies

2008-04-29T15:27:00.007+01:00

Making money out of selling vaginas is pretty tawdry stuff, says Mark Lewis

Mobile phone shops are selling vaginas to unsuspecting punters who only came in to get a pay as you go Nokia. That’s was the shocking finding of Dispatches Undercover (Monday, Channel 4, 8pm) which didn’t really find out anything nearly as interesting.

Rather, the hour-long show got a chap who looked a lot like Jeff Goldblum, to talk interminably about how phone shop salespeople try to up-sell customers more expensive deals. Some 20 minutes into the show, we were still being told at excruciating length that sales staff get a bigger commission for selling a contract deal than they do for selling a pay as you go.

‘Few customers are told that 18 month contracts are lengthy commitments,’ intoned Goldbum gravely. The Independence Day star didn’t spell out that 18 month contracts probably last around, ooh, 18 months, because, well, it does say so quite explicitly.

One interviewee told us that Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U, ‘want to sell you the highest value contracts, and lock you in as long as possible,’ because – you’re not going to believe this – a higher yielding deal will earn the salesperson a higher commission. What next? Someone selling plutonium to terrorists earns more cash than someone selling classified advertisements in the Thomson Directory?

There is nothing inherently wrong with this kind of consumer champion programme, the real problem is Dispatches uses the same production devices and portentous music for explaining the difference between a pay-as-you-go and a contract tariff as they would the sexual abuse of orphans, or the alien invasion of Guildford.

The faces of whistle blowing sales staff are blacked out, and their voices disguised as if they were Iraqi double agents revealing the location of those missing WMD. Rather than explaining that selling an 18 month contract is worth £15 in commission to the salesperson.

For sure, the phone networks have some questions to answer. Customers, for example, are often sold new contracts over the phone by companies claiming to work for Orange and promising the customers their original contracts will be terminated. They are not. And Orange shamefully refuses to terminate the original contract, leaving customers with two expensive and lengthy contracts rather than the one they can afford.

But this is largely just a polemic about companies trying to make money, when companies all over the world will do almost anything top do that.

Public Relations firms are famous for dreaming up campaigns for companies to sell unsuspecting consumers products under the guise of some spurious national celebration. So we have National Bed Month which encourages people to sleep more, National Greeting Card Week which encourages people to thank friends for unwanted gifts with jokes that someone else wrote. And now, according to Embarrassing Bodies (Channel 4, 9pm), National Vagina Day, for that half of the population which has never really considered getting one.

The three quacks rolled out for Embarrassing Bodies Week (the manky cocks are here on Thursday, girls!) talk about everything with such Jamie Oliver-esque chipper enthusiasm that you almost imagine that it’s rolls of pukka monkfish volauvents you are looking at rather than skanky rolls of extra vaginal skin.

And look, there isn’t a television reviewer in the country who isn’t wondering why someone with an illness too embarrassing to go to the doctor in their local clinic about, would go to see a doctor on television in front of millions. But it’s an unavoidable observation, so here goes.

There is no doubt that there is a freakshow fascination to Embarrassing Bodies. There shouldn’t be anything compelling about watching a doctor sticking her fingers up the anus of a giant women, who was made to feel ‘very embarrassed even now’. But when she says, ‘I’m growing old and I don’t want to be alone anymore,’ there really is. Even a negligent doctor might be able to advise a woman looking for a man to avoid having anal tags removed from her anus on television, but these docs are downright immoral.

One poor man who had lost 12 stone and was left with tits the size of beanbags was made to feel like, “I don’t want to show [the millions of viewers at home my horrendous tits] but I know I have to.”

This alas, is the sad state of confessional television.

And it’s on all week folks, so get your fill.

Reviews: Come Dine With Me; The Graham Norton Show

2008-04-18T12:52:00.004+01:00

Come Dine With Me is strangely compelling because the guests are so compellingly strange, says Mark Lewis

When you ask a bisexual man with a 550 piece Barbie collection to explain the difference between having sex with a woman and a man, you don’t necessarily expect a solemn response. But when Brian was told the main difference was the absence of a cock, he contrived to be offended anyway.

“Lee did not conduct himself with dignity tonight,” he said, before going off to plan a dinner party which included a dessert of bananas, tinned tangerine and whipped cream, in a room with a framed picture of Margaret Thatcher on the wall.

It was the first in the latest series of Come Dine With Me (Wednesday, Channel 4, 8pm) and a microcosm of the whole concept: weirdoes trying to outdo each other in the classnessness of their dinnertime.

It is one of Channel 4’s format documentaries. But where - especially in the early series’ - Wife Swap gave us drama and personal realisations of Shakespearean pathos, Come Dine With Me offers nothing deeper than a dented roasting tin.

It’s cheaper than a 12 pack of own brand, low alcohol lager from Lidl, but it’s still weirdly compelling in a Victorian voyeuristic kind of way. Four unusuals spend consecutive nights hosting dinner parties for each other for a prize of £1,000.

This week it was Brian, the local conservative councillor wannabe with a face like Eamonn Holmes and a picture of Maggie Thatcher in his living room; Lee, the drunk bisexual with a sinister collection of Barbie dolls; a third woman too non-descript to even remember her name; and Brenda, the retard.

I’m not a fan of freak shows per se. But Brenda belonged in a cage. She was a gobby, boxing Geordie with much to say and little to impart. She insisted on putting litres of Tabasco sauce on all of her meals, then complained to Brian that his food left her in the toilet all night. She wouldn’t eat red meat because “it rots and purifies in the gut.”

She meant putrifies. Which is rather what’s been happening to Graham Norton since his big money move to the BBC. He was poached from Channel 4 because of his success as a chat show host who gets his researches to scan the internet for features to mildly embarrass his guests while he says oooooooooh to the audience.

The BBC scratched around for a format to match his talents, before coming to the conclusion three years later that he was best suited as a chat show host who gets his researches to scan the internet for features to mildly embarrass his guests while he says oooooooooh to the audience.

The first in this series of The Graham Norton Show (BBC2, 9pm) featured a not terribly funny Kevin Bacon and a Tony Curtis, funny only because of the plastic surgery.

It’s not to everyone’s taste but at least it’s something.

Review: Born Survivor - Bear Grylls

2008-04-14T13:47:00.005+01:00

Bear Grylls' trek across the desert is about as credible as a date with a prostitute, says Mark Lewis

In his latest programme, we are asked to believe that Bear Grylls is a Born Survivor (Sunday, 8pm, Channel 4). But hang on! Isn’t the fact that that he was named Bear rather than, say, Ray a little unfair? Perhaps he wasn’t a born survivor after all. Perhaps he had survival thrust upon him

Being a Bear surely lends him a certain fierceness; a love of honey and a tired grumpiness in the winter months. Had he been called Dog Grylls we might expect a bit more truthfulness and spontaneity.

Alas Born Survivor is about as spontaneous as a crack at the world dominoes world record, and as honest as a human resources advisor. His trek across barren Saharan desert to the cool of the Atlas mountains has all the uncertainty of a proposition to a prostitute.

Even if you miss the disclaimer at the beginning of the programme telling you about the health and safety support and dramatic set-ups in the show, the over-dramatisation would blow the whole charade apart anyway. The opening sequence in which Bear talks earnestly over theatrical music has more cod drama than an Icelandic soap opera.

He says things like, “having the right survival skills can mean the difference between life and death,” and “being stranded here is like being cooked alive. Only the toughest survive.”

And he proves it by making his way from the helicopter to the surface of the Sahara by parachute. The not-quite-so-tough camera crew and equipment presumably land in the helicopter shortly after.

And Bear keeps on happening upon things in the Sahara desert as if he has just stumbled on it. “I’ve been looking for something like this,” he says, pretending to stumble upon a dried up river. “These are incredibly rare,” he adds, almost as if he had deliberately taken his film crew and headed for it.

“Woah, there’s a cobra,” he says, spotting a cobra and taking a little jump back, before telling us in his voiceover that the snake has actually been specially bussed in so that he can show us how to deal with it.

And this, perhaps, is this biggest charade of them all. Every now and then, the programme pretends that it is a public service announcement. Bear advises us that conserving water is paramount. Rather than swallow it immediately, you should keep it in your mouth, to keep your throat and tongue hydrated. Narrating an hour’s worth of film and wasting enough water to jerry up a slick of quicksand is probably not part of the advice.

“Whenever you are in a survival situation it is critical to keep body and soul together,” he says, which means removing your shirt, flexing you muscles and doing yoga poses while the sun sets in the background. “When you’re stuck in this part of the Sahara desert, your only chance of survival is to head for the Atlas Mountains,” we are told earnestly to the sound of millions at home jotting it down in their diary next to advice about looking left and right at road crossings.

With Ray Mears there is at least a vague sense that when he munches on a berry or rubs a couple of sticks together, he believes he is imparting something vaguely useful. And there’s the rub. It doesn’t matter how many times he pisses on his t-shirt and wraps it around his head, how many scorpions he eats for breakfast, or how many times he is filmed with his shirt blowing in the wind atop a Moroccan sand dune, Bear Grylls still just a thin Ray Mears.

He might look better with his shirt off, but the manufactured scenarios and camp dramatisations are just tics and affectations which detract from any substance, and appeal only to people whose favourite book is Bravo Two Zero.

Far from public service, this is entertainment for the moronic majority. As uncomfortable as making a programme in the desert no doubt is, the set-up here is faker than the applause for an Oscar winner, and even the programme makers know it. Desperate to sex up the safeness of the whole affair, Bear goes to great lengths to talk about how dangerous it all still is. Two of the film crew are evacuated during the programme with heatstroke, we are told - left wondering whether it is the poor suckers who are made to carry the heavy cameras while Bear looks handsome in the desert breeze.

The real calamity is that there might be a worthwhile programme in here somewhere. Even if his face betrays an I’m A Celebrity grossness when he does it, Bear, like Ray, is quite prepared to eat all kinds of horrible creepy crawlies just to keep us entertained.

The only question is this: had he been called Panda rather than Bear when he was handed a poisonous spider, would he have stuck it in his mouth, or ineffectually tried to mate with it?

Reviews: Tonight: Killer Lorries, Panorama: Jersey - Island of Secrets, Eastenders

2008-04-01T09:54:00.011+01:00

ITV's flagship current affairs programme is less inviting than a truck driver's passenger seat, says Mark Lewis

There surely isn’t a more sympathetic group of people in this country than UK lorry drivers. They helpfully keep our speed in check by passing each other at 56 and 57mph on two-lane motorways. They keep us entertained in service stations by writing hilarious racist banter on the walls of the toilet cubicles. And they keep our emotions in check by selflessly blockading fuel pumps preventing us from meeting up with our new girlfriends in Bournemouth in the year 2000.

‘This month’s Budget brought no relief for British truckers,’ said the voiceover in Tonight – Killer Lorries (Monday, 8pm ITV1) tugging at the compassionate threads of our weeping hearts like a master puppeteer.

Worst of all, the threat to these burly champions didn’t come just from a callous Government. It also came from foreigners. And let’s not forget: Quite apart from driving on our roads in their foreign trucks; these feverishly breeding foreigners bloat our population almost as quickly as our lorry drivers can keep it in check my murdering hitchhikers.

And the evil of foreigners doesn’t end there. Some of them can’t even speak English. “You vehicle no drive,” said a Kent policeman to a foreign truck driver who spoke perfectly good English. “Get tyre replaced. You responsibility not mine.”

And then just when you thought the programme couldn’t get any more lightweight, they rolled out Quentin Wilson. “What are the worst breaches you’ve seen?” he asked a UK truck driver.

Then: “What do these guys get up to?” Wilson was never Jeremy Paxman but neither was he quite so Alan Partridge. He used, at least, to be the sidekick to Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear. But in last night’s Tonight, he was reduced to showing us how dangerous left-hand drive (read: foreign) articulated lorries were, by driving one whilst saying, ‘it looks like I’m in control but I’m not. This is really scary. I’ve driven most things but this really freaks me out.”

No wonder he doesn’t do Top gear anymore. It’s not easy to see Richard “nearly-died-in-rocket-propelled-car-accident” Hammond being quite so easily perturbed. Neither did this faux-serious documentary even have any of the delicate sensitivity and moderation for which Clarkson and Top Gear are so famous.

“Foreign drivers are four times more likely to be tired than UK drivers, according to the police,” said Wilson. They are also nine times more likely to be homosexual, 16 times more likely to be paedophiles, and 140 times more likely to be responsible for the death of Princess Diana*.

Yes, foreign trucks are often un-roadworthy, the drivers are often tired, and there were 44 deaths associated with accidents involving overseas truck drivers in 2006. But this was simple tabloid foreign bashing at its most basic. The half-hour format of any documentary programme lends its subject very little credibility, and Tonight is more lightweight than a boxing match with Mr Muscle.

The teaser for next week’s Tonight told us people were prepared to lie to get jobs. The programme is going to set up a panel of judges to see if they can tell which of three candidates in a mock interview is lying. It will be hosted by Ian Wright with voiceover commentary from Harry Hill.

In reformatting to half-hour, Panorama (BBC1, 8.30pm) suffers from the same inherent credibility deficit. But last night’s programme, Jersey – island of Secrets, was a typically well researched documentary with lot of new information about the horrors of the Jersey children’s home, Haute de la Garenne, the inability of the Jersey authorities to govern themselves, and the probable cover up across the whole Island of an abuse scandal which last at least 40 years.

The comparison between the flagship current affairs documentary programmes on the two most popular free to air TV channels says a lot about the problems facing ITV. But as difficult as Panorama was to watch, at half hour it simply wasn’t long enough.

That’s not a criticism you can level at Eastenders (BBC1, 8pm), which has been trailing the return of Ricky and Bianca for the last few weeks like it was the biggest televisual event since the queen’s coronation in 1953. Had the queen then captained the English football team to World Cup success. On September 11.

The message here is that if you give something enough of a build-up then you can bring back anyone. Ricky was the first to return, approaching Pat with a glumness even more pronounced than usual. The credits were about to roll, so Pat knew something was up. ‘Something’s happened to Frank hasn’t it? What’s happened to Frank…’

Good luck bringing him back.

*research by the Daily Express xenophobe office of inaccurate statistics

Review: The Apprentice

2008-03-27T16:08:00.003Z

The new series of The Apprentice is as daft as ever, but also as welcome, says Mark Lewis

As a TV reviewer, I rate myself as probably the best in New Cross. Quite a claim, because - say what you like about New Cross - there are as many as 15 literate people on my street alone.

"As a sales person I rate myself as probably the best in Europe," says one of the contestants at the beginning of the latest series of The Apprentice (Wednesday, BBC1 9pm), leaving me feeling just a little short on ambition.

In a programme representing more egos than a session on the couch with Sigmund Freud, ambition is never going to be a problem. Talent, on the other hand, is.

We are told that these people represent the next generation of top entrepreneurs, but judging from their negotiating skills so far, they are about as sophisticated as an evening with Little and Large.

The girl’s team captain described herself as having been compared often with her childhood best friend. "My family has a big German Shepherd,” she told us. “I am often compared with him because…” she said something about ploughing right through people, but there wasn’t a person at home who (admit it) wasn’t thinking, “… because you’re a big fat dog?”

But she was at least tough. Her gambit for selling fish to a restauranteur: "Is that your best offer? Because I’ll definitely take it if that’s your best offer. But can I ask you to give me a little bit more?"

But somehow the boys were even worse. Michael asked a solicitors office for a £130 for a box of fish.

"I’ll give you fifty quid."
"I’m going to have to ask you for a hundred quid"
"I’ll give you fifty quid"
"Sixty-five?"
"fifty quid."
"Okay…

"I negotiated as best I could, but I could only get £50," he said when he got back. And he wasn’t even fired.

The first person to be fired was a barrister who couldn’t count. Nicholas managed to mix up the difference between a kilo and a lobster, then attempted to explain away his ineptitude by telling former Tottenham Hotspur Chairman Alan Sugar that he wasn’t the sort of bloke who could get on easily with a conversation about football.

He was thicker than a kilo of low fat Sainsburys Basics cheddar, and a terrifying indicator of the kind of cretin who might end up defending me if I ever decide to impress Alan Sugar by selling crack to kids.

That, at least, would demonstrate to sir Alan the kind of entrepreneurial spirit which was so clearly missing from Nicholas, and give me an opportunity to try to get in with Alan by doing my impression of a kids TV character.

Sir Alan is already like a grown up Zippy, bullying his charges like a collection of scared Georges. He thunders around the Rainbow studio with panto villainy, pointing and bellowing like a beanstalk giant.

‘This is a business bootcamp,’ he says at the start. ‘Mary Poppins I am not.’ But only because he is already contracted to play one of the ugly sisters at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens this Christmas.

His two henchmen add to the panto fun. In past series Margaret and Nick have been consigned to doing little more than watching from the background wearing turd-sucking expressions and standing silently behind Alan while he camps it up in the boardroom.

This time they are let off the leash to lash out at the contestants: in this case Raef, who is set to become the star of this show. He’s posher than Prince William and camper than Simon Cowell. “I’m prepared to fight to the death in the boardroom,” he said. “Words are my tool.” Tool is right.

Review: Horizon: How Does You Memory Work, and Ex-Files: The Heather McCartney story

2008-03-25T23:32:00.005Z

Horizon used to be more telling than this, but at least it was more of a scoop than the Ex-Files, says Mark Lewis

I will never forget the voice. It was a woman’s voice. I was sure it was. But then a man appeared. Dr Alain Brunet had – dear God – the body of a man but the voice of a woman.

I can’t imagine I will ever be able to forget it.

Luckily, Dr Brunet also was an expert in erasing painful memories. He will have little need to erase the memory of the programme on which he was featured, Horizon: How Does Your Memory Work (Tuesday, BBC2, 9pm), because the memory is fading already, and the credits are barely rolling.

I can remember a time when Horizon used to deliver programmes which had a point and conclusion, however spurious. It is something the programme has apparently forgotten. The conclusion here, intoned with much gentle Scottish gravity by the actor John Hannah, was that ‘your memory is you’.

Turns out Alzheimers disease is also fucking terrible. Thanks very much John. What next? A kick in the bollocks is fairly painful? Drinking tequila gets you smashed?

My research is already way ahead of that of the Horizon team. Dr Brunet told us that the beta blockers he was using to impair people’s memory was the start of a real breakthrough in helping people to forget. How does seven pints of snakebite followed by 12 shots of black sambuka down the Watford Ritzy on a Friday night work for ya?

Horizon was the equivalent. It will not represent a painful memory. It was not that affecting. Rather, this was an hour of platitudes backed up by research into the blatant.

Some 25 minutes into the programme, Hannah was still explaining that our memories of the past help us to imagine the future. One poor soul whose Hippocampi had never developed properly lived in a state of perpetual happiness, never really thinking about the past but never worrying about the future either.

Anything he had to recall he had to write down.

If I ever read what I’ve written here again, I doubt I’ll remember this programme.

But at least it didn’t have the cheek to describe itself as an exclusive.

The same cannot be said of ITV1 which described its quickly cobbled together Ex-Files (10.35pn) as just such. The ex in this case was ex Mrs McCartney, Heather. And with some relish, the programme took to unravelling her fanciful life.

There is little doubt that Ms Mills is a unedifying fantasist and self-publicist. Her demand for £124m and attitude to ending up with just £24m of Paul’s cash is all abhorrent.

The judge described her as a ‘less than candid witness’ who is ‘devoid of reality and who indulges in make believe.’ In the mid-1990s she was apparently passing herself off as a completely different Heather Mills who worked on the Observer, and getting jobs on the back of her work. She dumped her ex-fiance just six days before they were due to be married having met multi-million Paul. She starred in a soft porn book, and claimed it was an educational pamphlet. She exaggerated an abuse scandal from her childhood, having pretended to have been imprisoned by a paedophile for three days – dropping her childhood friend in amongst her lies in the process.

But she could have been the brains behind Idi Amin, and she still wouldn’t have been half as loathsome as the bright orange old hags they wheeled out to condemn her on this programme.

Face after face of bleached blonde, vinegar-titted old celebrity hacks were sent out to put the claws in to her, their dried up old fannies practically smiling at the prospect of taking someone down a peg or two – well at least one peg anyway.

This said a lot more about the bitchiness which pervades popular media than it did about Heather or Paul – who, by the way, has been shit for 40 years.

Review: Dancing on Ice: The Final

2008-03-16T22:44:00.003Z

Dancing on Ice was beautiful but hideous like the cinematography on The Elephant Man, says Mark Lewis

As a phone voting vehicle for the dancing skills of little known celebrities from some of the most moronic programmes on television, Dancing on Ice: The Final (Sunday, 7pm ITV1) is begging to be loathed. And it is.

But it is popular, and it has its charms. So let me be fair for just a couple of paragraphs: Chris Fountain, star of idiot’s soap, Hollyoaks, can properly boogy for a big lad. He is elegant despite his size, magnanimous in victory and graceful in defeat. Suzanne Shaw, former Hear’Say victim and victim of Darren Day love rattery was brave and beautiful throughout. She soared electrifyingly in a her harness, her routine capturing a maximum 30 points from the obligatory panel of judges.

It was the first time in the history of Dancing on Ice anyone had got a 30. Then she did it again. The ‘Ice Panel’ gushed. In the audience her son cried ecstatic tears for mummy. And on a sofa in London a hard heart melted for the briefest of a moments.

But only the briefest. “If you are hosting your own Dancing on Ice party tonight then enjoy,” said Phillip Schofield. Yes, enjoy drinking yourself into fighting mood with cheap sparkling wine and Skol Super, because this programme is aimed at a common denominator lower than a Barry White ballad.

Before multi-channel TV and remote controllers, you could tell a lot about a programme and who it’s aimed at from the adverts during the commercial breaks. And even if nobody watches them any more the advertisements can still perpetrate an effective character assassination. Joss Stone having an affair with a Flake was fairly non-incriminating, but Denise van Outen professing her love of fresh meat on behalf of Morrisons, followed by an ad for Ferrero Rocher was an indictment so damning, only an Ocean Finance commercial could have made its downmarketness any more explicit.

But don’t hate it for that. There is so much more. Patronising its core demographic is ITV1’s prerogative, but commissioning this again will continue to be a stain on the pyjamas of popular TV. Some of the dancing was stunning; Jane Torville and Christopher Dean can still do a bit; and Schofield and Holly Willoughby are nice looking and professional. But Dancing on Ice is tedious, formulaic and derivative. It is as different from Strictly Come dancing as Coke is from Pepsi.

Suzanne Shaw won incidentally.

Review: Sports Relief does The Apprentice

2008-03-13T13:05:00.009Z

As appealing as Lembit Opik no doubt is, he's never going to pip Louise Redknapp for celebrity lolly, says Mark Lewis

However evenly the teams might be matched. However adept the business acumen of the respective clans. However much you don’t like bullshitters or schmoozers: Unless you can give an ageing billionaire a hope he might cop a feel of Louise Redknapp’s tits, you ain’t never gonna win celebrity Apprentice.

In Sport Relief does The Apprentice (Wednesday, 9pm, BBC1) the men’s team were neither well matched nor adept. Whether they liked bullshitters or schmoozers is difficult to tell. They certainly weren’t very good at it. Mr Cheeky Girl, aka. Lembit Opik, aka. Limp Bizkit winked at Formula 1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, and said, “whatever you want - within the law - I’ll do it.”

Why stop at the law? What chance a back bench Lib Dem MP making a legal promise to a man who bought the Labour government for 100,000 packets of fags?

Oh yes, Lembit, perhaps you could persuade your party to sit ineffectively in the cheap seats in The Commons for 80 years campaigning limply in the west country for better rights for badgers.

Then palm off Bernie Ecclestone.

If then, you could just persuade your Cheeky Girl missus to be less Romanian, more footballer’s wife, less former X-Factor, more like her what’s married to Jamie Redknapp; and with whiter teeth then you might be able to persuade Mike Ashley to part with some cash.

Mike Ashley spent £100,000 on three tickets for some ropey shopping do the girls had put together, at just the faintest whiff of a chance of a feel off Louise Redknapp. He owns Newcastle United and founded the sports chain, Sports Direct. Sports Direct sells a load of Lonsdale gear. Limp Bizkit persuaded Lonsdale to donate £1,500 worth of sports tat.

At a sporting imbalance of £98,500, the boys were going to have to put their own white-toothed battle plan into action. Former Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, has definitely had some dental work done but he was too busy offending his team mates to offer anyone a cheeky feel.

Hardeep Singh Kohli was “fucking thick,” he was “like Hitler”, supposed to be managing a team, “not invading fucking Poland.” Limp Bizkit’s call to his Cheeky Girl, meanwhile, wasn’t going to raise “any more than about £80.”

In the end the boys were spared utter humiliation by Ecclestone’s offer to double whatever they earned. Perhaps that Cheeky hand job worked after all.

Reviews: Delia, and The Fixer

2008-03-10T23:19:00.005Z

Back once again for the renegade master. Delia's back and she's as sexy as ITV's new primetime drama, says Mark Lewis

Slap a food ASBO on her crazy ass, she done gone completely mental.

So crazy in fact that the trailer to her new programme (a programme itself so crazy and sexy it can’t even be bothered with a proper name) is set to the tune of Renegade Master.

On Planet Food Cookery Programmes, Delia (Monday, 8.30pm, BBC2), which seeks to take the pain out of cookery by using packaged ingredients, stands up to the billing with sultry assurance.

Delia was always a matronly sex symbol, her homely recipes winking with vague suggestion at our unrequited lust. These days she’s too wanton for proper recipes. She sluttily throws around ready made tubs of cheese sauce and frozen mashed potato - tickling our betrousered nutsacks like some Oedipal egg whisk.

“I want to hear you slurp,” she growls to the cameraman with a bowl of cold soup. She beckons us into her garden shed, dismissing the paraphernalia of 30 years worth of cooking as casually as she fingers the oily grills of cookery novices. “There are other things apart from food,” she winks.

“It’s quite naughty in a way,” says food writer, Nigel Slater, with Carry On innuendo… “there is a certain amount of permission from headmistress”

Ooh, that’s right you naughty girl, allow us to use that ready made tinned mince!

If only. In the real world, Delia is as renegade as a Community Support Officer. Far from horny Bravo watchers, Delia is aimed at women who are afraid of fish skins. Just because she has done away with a surname, she hasn’t suddenly become Madonna. And aside from her legendary bitchiness, (which saw her proclaim she couldn’t stand “poncey food” over a cutaway of Rick Stein’s latest cookery book), and that time she had that ‘letsbeavinyou’ drunken episode at Norwich City, she is as interesting and sexy as Trisha.

Over on ITV, Andrew Buchan was being equally sexy in The Fixer (9pm).

The programme, from the same stable as Spooks and Life on Mars, is supposed to be daftly entertaining. Perhaps it is. But, with a set-up as clunky as a public teenage kiss, suspending disbelief becomes faintly painful.

For the record: The Fixer’s sister was raped and abused by her aunt and uncle. He killed them. He went to prison. He was released on the condition that he killed someone else for some reason. But it’s alright he was a bad guy. Now the Fixer is being made to keep on killing bad guys by some menacing Scottish bloke. He would rather not do it; rather go to prison. “Promise me you won’t go away again, I need my brother back,” says his sister in an unrelated scene. Think of your sister man!

He is supposed to have the same dark morality as HBO’s serial killer, Dexter, with the same brooding charisma. Unfortunately, Buchan is less Byronic anti-hero than sulky teenage pouter.

At least he is more renegade than Delia.

Reviews: Unreported World: The Drowning Country, and New Heroes of Comedy

2008-03-09T19:03:00.009Z

The story of a sinking nation is guaranteed longevity as surely as the comedy brilliance of Sacha Baron Cohen, says Mark Lewis

Bangladesh is sinking. Unreported World: The Drowning Country (Friday, Channel 4, 7.35pm) could have asked why. Rather it asked who. The device is effective: Its grieving mothers, desperate fathers, and dying children make us question the profligacy of our own lives much more surely than a whole series of programmes on the evils of Chelsea tractors.

Ramita Navai (check out an interview with her on the televisionreview podcast) submerges herself in the story as surely as Bangladesh’s coastal regions are being submerged by the tides. She rejects the fuck-you indifference of the jaded foreign correspondent, lending her own compassion to the battered humanity of her subjects.

The result is a beautifully shot, chaotically moving tale of terrible loss, with a sense that the Unreported World team is experiencing some of the same chaos as its subjects. It is two weeks since the latest typhoon; the floods - which used to come every 20 years but now arrive every five - have claimed yet more Bangladeshi homes; and Navai (who reveals her concern in the televisionreview podcast) does not let us off the emotional hook.

She is guided through the filthy mud by friendly hands, breathlessly showing us where the homes of her guides used to be. She apologises to a man whose wife and son are buried on a mass grave. She reaches out to bereaved women and children with an encouraging, friendly hand on quivering arms and legs. She excels in encouraging the sad narrative from everyone she meets, but is equally adept at sharing the joy of a school child too young to know any better. Navai is allowed to be flawed, moved and human. The result is a film which stays with our guilty conscience far longer than those with more obviously accusatory fingers.

Sacha Baron Cohen has already achieved longevity. As the creator of Ali G and Borat, his place amongst comedy immortality is assured, and he is rightly the subject of Channel 4’s final New Heroes of Comedy (Friday, 9pm).

The great power of his characters was their ability to tease the pomposity out of the British political and upper classes who were only too quick to patronise the youth culture of Ali G and the foreignness of Borat. When he became one of the most recognised faces in Britain, he was able to tap into the race consciousness of the United States. The raucousness of the audience at his rendition of ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ (So My Country Can be free) was one of the most shockingly hilarious jokes of the naughties.

But ultimately it was the ignorance of his subjects which gave this brilliant, brave man the canvas upon which to daub his consummate comedy. There is no criticism here. As surely as Aristotle was the heir to Plato and Socrates, Baron Cohen is the heir to Chris Morris and Peter Cook. Their line of ancestry lies in their braveness and ability to deliver funny satire.

You will be hard pressed to find a braver or funnier gag than singing the ‘Kazakhstan national anthem’, with its line about all other nations being homosexuals, to the tune of the stars and stripes at a rodeo full of hicks. But he has been co-opted so thoroughly by popular culture that you fear he will never be funny again. We cannot blame Baron Cohen for appearing in Hollywood comedies, but we must hope that his familiarity does not quell forever his power to entertain.

Comedy prostitutes have been waiting for years for Chris Morris to disappear for long enough to come back and fuck us all over again. For the good of comedy, Sacha Baron Cohen needs to fuck off for a few years too.

Review: University Challenge Final, Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe, Curb your Enthusiasm

2008-03-04T23:04:00.007Z

Lucien mettommo has an intellectual night in

They say it is a fine line between genius and insanity. If the final of University Challenge (Thursday, BBC2 8pm) has taught us anything (and it hasn’t), it is that that line has been well and truly blurred. Christ College Oxford emerged victorious over Sheffield in a fairly tight contest. However, when you have a freak of intelligence, such as the captain of the Oxford team, the contest is never really in doubt. Out of the 1200 points they scored throughout the whole series, he must have scored at least a thousand of them. His ability is so remarkable that I could probably be on his team, free riding my way to the final, occasionally butting in with the wrong answer, losing the team five points along the way, safe in the knowledge that good old ’Kaufmann’ will always bail me out. Indeed, in this sense, it could be said that the moral victory was Sheffield’s. At least every member of their team occasionally chipped in with an attempt at a correct answer.

For the random punter directing his attention to the show, you could be forgiven for feeling slightly inadequate. There are only limited occasions when the answer to the particular question will be ‘Disraeli’. However, it is also important to realise that, from the look of all the finalists, they could all be potential serial killers. Indeed, if we look beyond the substance of the show itself, the sickening undertones of a world far darker than our own begin to emerge. This is particularly evident from Paxman’s shameless flirtations with the rather odd captain of the Sheffield team to the strange facial mannerisms of one particular member of the Oxford team. Such mannerisms indicating that the particular person in question was obviously in the process of taking a giant shit in his pants throughout the whole duration of the show. Such darkness reached its nadir when a startled Joan Bakewell was asked by Paxman to provide the winners with their prizes; four semi automatic shot guns and four long black coats… (this didn’t actually happen).

From one programme of intellectual rigour to another. Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (Channel 4 9pm) explored the genius of Stephen Hawking. The documentary was enlightening in the sense that I now know that negative particles get sucked into a black hole whilst positive particles remain outside of such (or was it the other way round). However, I am no intellectual giant, and thus much of the substance of the documentary went right over my head. However, what is remarkable is that Stephen Hawking, a person who has suffered with motor neurone disease throughout his whole life, has defied all medical expectations and is still alive at the age of 66. He is still working as a Professor and a Tutor to PHD students. It seems that his lifelong struggle to discover a unified Big Bang Theory has mirrored an incredibly brave struggle against such a debilitating illness. In his own words: “I was unlucky to get motor neurone disease, but I have been lucky in every other aspect of my life.”

Something was required to lighten the mood, and Curb your Enthusiasm (More 4 10:35pm) certainly provided this. Cheryl finally left Larry. She has been long suffering, but, throughout the whole history of the programme, I have never really liked her. Undoubtedly, this is probably of Larry David’s own construction considering his own real life marital difficulties. Again, Larry is right in everything he says or does, but, as per usual, misunderstandings conspire against him. The Show culminates with Larry struggling with a testicle injury, whilst his friends pick Cheryl over him. Also, Marty Funkhauser’s daughter in the show appears to be ‘Blossom’, which is also quite exciting.

Reviews: Eurovision Your Decision, Gardener's World

2008-03-01T22:43:00.004Z

Mark Lewis sees a weekend of improbables turn into two days of fultility

Some things are futile: like making a watchable gardening programme, remembering the names of runners-up on The X-Factor, or persuading Lithuania not to award maximum points to Estonia in the Eurovision Song Contest.

But that doesn’t stop people dreaming. In Eurovision Your Decision (Saturday 9pm, BBC1) the best of British warbled their way to the brink of Eurovision humiliation with an intoxicating blend of enthusiasm, naivete, *terrific song writing and Claudia Winkleman.

Winkleman winklemaned her way through the main event and results show like a cheap Davina McCall, gurning with bright orange conviction at Terry Wogan’s erratic asides. Wogan sat atop a silver throne throughout, seeping syphilitic madness like Eurovision royalty. And the Eurovision hopefuls sang inept vocals with karaoke abandon, having first introduced themselves on short films of hair-shedding embarrassment.

“I’m just a typical lad from Rotherham,” said one, thinking airily of the rest of the boys who work in the local power station all dreaming of emulating Celine Dione by performing camp ballads on Eurovision, to the backing track of ‘Nul Points.’ Another all-girl act thought their cosmopolitanism would be their trump. One was Portuguese; one was Swedish; one was British. They were all shit. A Romanian girl was next, all girlish excitement, batty charm, and pretty face. “I’m from near Transylvania,” she said before reappearing looking more like a transvestite.

That bloke who came second in the X-Factor that year… you know the one… erm… the black guy… ooh… good voice… not at all memorable… I’ll look his name up on Google and put in the key words at the bottom of this article… anyway, he came on having written his own song. It was called… erm… Whatever

Look, he won. Britain (or at least those people in Britain who vote with their telephones) had spoken. And that, I think, is all we need to know about our chances of succeeding in Eurovision this year.

The only question is whether it is more or less futile than trying to make a watchable programme about gardening.

Like an accidental conception after floppy-cock sex, the BBC has made a semi-effective attempt at sexing up Ski Sunday. But spinning some of the televisual viagra out to the barren terrain of the equally niche Gardener’s World (Friday, 8pm, BBC2) was always going to prove deflating.

No matter how many times Monty Don walks whimsically through how ever many forests; no matter how many elderly ladies would love to tie him up and force feed him tea; no matter how much gargantuan hyperbole he employs, gardening is still as sexy as cream crackers. “This is really radical gardening,” he seemed to implore.

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and allow Monty his absurd fancy. His colleague was building a nectar bar on the edge of the big garden to attract insects, much like you might build a Bacardi Breezer bar on the edge of big towns to attract 19 year old slags. So far, so radical. But her method was the truly radical part. Oh No! She was cutting down old branches and - get this – rather than clear it up, she was just leaving it right there on the floor.

“That’s pretty radical,” said Monty.

No it’s not. That’s just gardening. No matter how radical he says it is, gardening is about as radical as, as… similes fail me: Gardening is about as radical as gardening. There really isn’t very much to it. “Between all of us we’ll be covering every aspect of gardening throughout the year,” he added. Like getting paid £10 by your mother to mow the lawn and sticking yourself with nettles while you sulkily try to put weeds in torn up black bags?

And that’s it. What are they going to do for the rest of the series?

*may not be true

Review: Freaky Eaters and Wonderland: The 92 Year Old Danger Junkie

2008-02-27T22:55:00.005Z

Some very different interpretations of freaks leaves Mark Lewis rather cold

Isn’t it a shame when words are dumbed down? I don’t want to be an old codger here, but ‘gay’ used to be a perfectly good way of describing a homosexual, now it’s been appropriated by school kids to mean something not terribly good. ‘Sick’ used to be a decent way of describing the act of intercourse with ones own sister. Now it could be perfectly well employed to describe the act of having sex with, say, a pair of sisters from a different family altogether.

But the worst of all is ‘freak.’ It used to be the moniker of thumb sized girls who dance for biscuits, the grossly deformed, and South Koreans. Now it can mean practically anything. By rights, Freaky Eaters (Wednesday, 9pm, BBC3) should have been about Elephant Man-style unfortunates who consume potatoes through their bottoms.

Instead it was about a man who didn’t like vegetables. Admittedly his girlfriend was a vegetarian, which adds some carrots to their particular casserole, but the man hardly belongs in a circus. He only ate meat, he didn’t know what cheese was, and he was terrified of a bowl of fruit. But the freakiest thing about him was that after six years in a relationship with his girlfriend, the pair still lived with her mother.

Over on BBC2 David was still living with his father Ron, but Wonderland: the 92 Year Old Danger Junkie (9.50pm) was far too gently moving a programme to name call. The Wonderland series might catalogue unusual people but the ubiquitously meaningless ‘freak’ is not a word which is going to end up in the final edit – even if Ron Cunningham, aka The Great Omani at least had the decency to run off to the circus.

That, however, was 70 years ago. Now, at 92, he was the oldest stunt man in the world.

The film began with a South Korean film crew following him around while he set fire to himself, walked around on broken bottles, and smashed glasses on his throat, and the peculiar South Korean journalist jumped around and squealed melodramatically like some Japanese, geriatric, punishment, wank fantasy.

But even if Ron, (who during the film suffered a stroke, and was diagnosed with prostate cancer and liver failure) was a local side show, the programme was never going to fall into that trap. It was really a sad story about an ageing man’s interdependent relationship with his ancient father.

As his father’s assistant, who had never enjoyed show business, David had suffered his father’s stunts for years. Now he was a full time carer whose endless asides to his dogs revealed an unhappy, lonely soul. The Great Omani, despite his ailments was able to go to his death with his cigars and glasses of whiskey, asking “isn’t it rather nice to have been someone?” Now in his 60s, let’s hope there is still time for his son to leave his mark.

Review: American Inventor and Supersize versus Superskinny

2008-02-26T23:18:00.008Z

The latest reality programming reveals a dearth of imagination stinkier than an anal thermometer, says Mark lewis

Here’s an idea for a programme: A variety food show in which teenagers vote whose celebrity excrement Gillian McKeith will sing a business proposition to.

We could call it American Shit Idol, and have Alan Sugar head a panel of bastards telling deluded teenagers their turds aren’t shitty enough.

If Channel 4 doesn’t commission it, then Virgin 1 will.

In American Inventor (Tuesday, 9pm, Virgin 1) it almost has. Even if the concept isn’t inherently shit Simon Cowell’s involvement as executive producer is a guarantee.

Cowell, the critic, has already cracked America by sitting on one side of a panel and telling deluded teenagers how to sing. He was followed by Piers Morgan, the former newspaper editor, who has also cracked America by sitting on one side of a panel and telling deluded teenagers how to publish faked pictures in their own newspapers (possibly). Now Cowell is looking to crack America with Peter Jones, the wealthy entrepreneur and Dragon’s Den bastard, who sits on one side of a panel and tells crackpot inventors why they’re wasting their time.

But try as he might, Jones just isn’t camp enough. Yes, he’s English; yes he’s a bastard, but he’s no ugly sister. Cowell, meanwhile, camps his way through American Idol like a construction worker in ballet shoes. But in trying to reproduce the Evan Davis-inspired, cross-eyed brilliance of Dragons’ Den, Cowell has fallen right on his tutu.

No matter the million dollar prize for the best invention; no matter the sexed up graphics; screaming hopefuls in the crowd; and camera work designed to set the judges up as WWF-style villains, American Inventor is not nearly as compelling as Dragon’s Den. It’s not even as compelling as American Idol.

Its one saving grace is George Foreman, whose qualifications for being on the panel is 30 years of getting punched in the head and ten years of endorsing a portable cooker. He is like a drunk tourist in a sombrero shop. “I could use something like that,” he says tucking a straw donkey under his arm. “I could use something like that,” he says with a suitcase full of miniature Eiffel Towers. “I could use something like that” he says to a man who has invented an umbrella/radio.

The terrible thing is this: Foreman’s acquiescences are no more rash than the commissioner of light entertainment on Channel 4. Evidently “I could use something like that,” is exactly the sort of phrase he used when someone pitched the idea of an hour long, primetime dieting variety show which would pit a very fat person somehow against an unhealthily slim person, and run various features about dieting in between.

The name: Supersize versus Superskinny (Tuesday, 8pm, Channel 4).

The premise: fat lass and skinny lass eat each others’ diets for a week.

The twist: this week the fat lass ate healthy food and the skinny one ate the unhealthy takeaways. Cue much contrived revulsion from the fat girl at the prospect of eating chips and sausages, and much genuine chaviness from the skinny one at the prospect of eating anything not available in McDonalds.

Now split the narrative up with Gillian McKeith, taking a long enough break from poking through people’s turds and pretending to be a doctor, to introduce some tedious feature on snack food.

I couldn’t watch it to the end but I assume supersize and superskinny eventually both decided their diets were equally unhealthy and resolved to change their dietary habits in future. Hurrah! Then viewers text voted for the fat one to eat the skinny one with a fat-free side salad.

Television review: Masterchef, University Challenge and Transexuals in Iran

2008-02-25T23:11:00.007Z

Paxman might be scary, but he's not nearly as terrifying as a pork mousse, says Mark Lewis

Won’t there just be a giant hole in BBC2’s evening schedules when Masterchef (Monday-Thursday) finally concludes this week? Do the hosts Greg and John just love talking to each other in rhetorical questions? And just how curious are the hosts’ various other verbal ticks?

When not rhetorical questions: Short sentences. No verbs.

One bald: Desserts good. One sartorially challenged: A bit Australian. Both orally identical.

Their bizarre delivery gives the pair a Phil-and-Grantish gruff masculinity. But because the few verbs they do employ are mostly to express terror (and then, terror of food) their hard-man image is rather compromised. They are like a couple of effete bouncers – just tough enough to prevent pissed-up 16 year olds from getting into nightclubs in white trainers. Just gay enough to find the prospect of an 18-year-old who plates up a dish of pork mousse “truly frightening.”

“The cream scared me,” said Greg or John.

“It’s the mousse which scares me,” said the other.

Both are equally terrified of the prodigious Emily who has fought her way through to this week-long final with bouts of culinary alchemy so appreciated by Greg and John, that you begin to wonder whether Jesus’s water-into-wine miracle wasn’t just some first century party trick.

Even so, should Emily fall at this fearsome final hurdle, she does have a fall back prize. The voiceover lady who gives us occasional relief from Greg and John’s peculiar vernacular tells us she has a place at Oxford University.

Whether that turns out to be a booby prize is a question worthy of an ask on University Challenge (Monday, 8pm BBC2). “Are you happy to hang out exclusively with brilliant nerds?”

Perhaps it is the steeples of that ancient city, perhaps it is the history seeping out of the walls, most likely it is the perpetuation of fop-like donishness at the application stage which prevents oiks from making it into those hallowed halls. But prevented they are.

The captain of the Magdelene College, Oxford team in this semi-final looked like a cross between Andy Warhol and a young Richard Whitely. The captain from Sheffield looked like the kind of four-eyed psycho who talks to you unbidden in kebab shop toilets.

But this psycho was sharper than a bully’s compass and Oxford were thoroughly thrashed.

A thrashing would be the least of the worries of some of the unfortunates in Transexuals in Iran (Monday, 9pm, BBC2). In Iran, we learn, homosexuality is illegal and sex changes are not. Homosexuals could end up getting stoned. Transexuals are ten times more likely to get their operations in Tehran than they would be in a European capital

They have an illness which has a cure. The illness is homosexuality.

Finally, something for Greg and John to get truly scared of.

Watch The Birdie

2007-04-12T18:23:00.000+01:00

Helen Parton is mesmerized by fores, fairways and five irons

Viewing the human race from outer space, golf must seem a pretty peculiar activity to any alien life forms and watching it on TV must count as even stranger. So many strokes per hole predetermined by it’s never clear who and whoever has the most under par, assuming the cut of your plus fours is right, and dividing the number you first thought of – wins.
But the expanse of calming greenery and lack of anything too taxing on the brain (ignoring aforementioned logic-less scoring) is perfect for Sunday night TV, which is why I was tuned into the US Masters (BBC2, Far Too Long). Given that the most televisual excitement you’re likely to encounter TV-wise on this day of the week is an elderly Yorkshire gentleman falling off a dry stone wall or someone stealing a pig, again in Yorkshire, and making off in an Austin 7 soundtracked by the Hollies, it’s perfect scheduling. And so in Augusta, there was nothing much doing: Tiger Woods got a bit angry and managed to snap one of his clubs in two, one shot went in the crowd narrowly missing some dullard golf fanatic and at home we all involuntarily went ‘Uhhhhhhhhhhooooohhh’ as another ball nearly went in, in a response nearly as Pavlovian as grabbing the top of one’s head at a penalty miss. Oh for the days of John Daly, who caused uproar in golfing circles years ago by only having one technique, namely ‘twat the ball as far as you can’ or tres silly Frenchman Jean Van der Val, who squandered the British Open a while back by playing a ball even though it was partly submerged in a pond and sacrificing numerous swinging splashes at it in strokes. No such characters this time around, it was all bland blokes with flat bottoms squeezed into bad slacks. Our own wacky Ian Poulter could only muster a Doherty-like trilby, but in a distinctly un-Babyshambles like shade of baby pink and with no staircases on the course to do a comedy roll down clutching aforementioned headgear, the similarities ended there.
The only real joke of the tournament being Gary Lineker’s airfare over there to do, well it appears, very little, aside from topping up his tan and chatting to some old pros. Even then the old crisp muncher wimped out and got a sore throat. I’d like to think this was from shouting ‘Uhhhhhhhhhhooooohhh’ to women with names like Dixie Lee and Krystal in Hot Legs 11, Georgia’s finest lap dancing emporium, on a racy night out with Peter Alliss and Sam Torrance. But a Quaver probably just went down the wrong way instead.
With Manish Bhasin having bagged the cushy Cricket World Cup presenting slot in the West Indies, the ever dependable Ray Stubbs and Adrian Chiles must be wondering what they did wrong to be stuck with some sweaty blokes in XXXL acrylic at the darts, or discussing United Biscuits’ share price on Working Lunch respectively.
The golf was won by some God fearing American, our boys having patriotically choked in the last round, in case you were wondering. Never mind the aliens, what on Earth was I thinking putting in so many hours to find out?

Phats Entertainment

2007-04-04T21:14:00.000+01:00

Helen Parton finds TV’s blonde females rule

Those expecting a further installment of Vanessa Feltz meltdown on this celebrity edition of Wife Swap (Sunday, Channel 4, 9pm) will have been disappointed, but otherwise this was TV gold. In what is now rather a tired format, Feltz agreed to trade places with Debbie McGee, and spend a week in the home of magician Paul Daniels. I suspect after his dismal performances here – failing to get a candle to ‘jump’ he may as well have got his coat. Or should that be magic cloak. Meanwhile McGee was finding a week as Vanessa was exhausting as she not only hosts a morning radio show but trails her boyfriend Ben Ofoedu, ten years her junior, to endless PAs in provincial nightclubs by night. He only seemed to have one song though, a Phats and Small number (was he Phats or was he Small, we never did find out) which he would belt out at any opportunity: ‘Hey what’s with you/you’re looking kind of down to me/And things ain’t getting ovvvvvvverrr/Listen to what I say. Got to turn arooooooound’.
Vanessa was finding the solitude in whichever godforsaken bit of the Home Counties Daniels now calls home a trifle trying and after the swap dragged him to the pub where she proceeded to invite locals to slam tequila with her. The next night, the odd couple headed to a West End club where his magic failed yet again to cut the entertainment mustard, not when la Feltz was on the dance floor, a sea of sequins and décolletage, at least. Under the McGee regime, Ofoedu was banned from ‘celebrity’ dinners with the likes of Shane Lynch from Boyzone and had to spend more time at home learning more than one song. Which he didn’t seem that keen on. McGee and Daniels just seem downright strange and introverted, whereas I’d happily do a shot with Feltz any time. I do worry though that a remarkably lucid woman has such a fatal flaw in not spotting a toyboy layabout when she sees one. Maybe I’ll call her radio show and tell her.
Speaking of blonde bombshell female DJs (oooooh, the seamlessness) I went to a recording of the Culture Show (Friday, 7:30, BBC2) this week, presented by Lauren Laverne who is to my mind hovering dangerously close to Jimmy Carr-like ubiquity. And unlike Nick Yates’ review of the Al Murray programme, I had quite a good time, apart from the having to pretend the guests weren’t there and we just happened to find ourselves sipping soft drinks in a dimly lit bar on an unremarkable Tuesday thing. “Gentle chatter” the director would call as we all tried not to gawp at gorgeous, leggy, urbane Laverne. Guests included John Simm (shorter than you’d think, bit boring) Mark Kermode (huge man, rock solid quiff) Frank Skinner (can’t tune a banjo to save his life, just about the right side of the funny/irritating divide). Music was courtesy of several boys from Sunderland with amazing cheekbones and even more amazing guitar effects’ pedals. It was a supergroup consisting of members of Field Music, Maximo Park (currently on heavy rotation on webmaster Lewis’s MP3 player) and the Futureheads. But those lads have a way to go before they steal Phats and Small’s crown of best ever album title. Its name? Now, Phats What I Call Music. Genius.

The show must go on

2007-03-18T11:40:00.000Z

It's alright if it takes the scenic route. But Lost doesn't even know what town it's in, says David Davies

I was a massive fan of The X-Files. I had a schoolboy crush on Gillian Anderson and tuned in every week to see if David Duchovny would trip over his bottom lip. It was a thrilling show; grown-up science fiction minus the tongue-in-cheek, treating subject matter such as alien abduction and liver-eating stretchy men with the seriousness they deserved. Of particular interest to a schoolboy with nothing to do in the winter months except attempt to surf the net on a 56k modem was what is now referred to as the "mythology" of the series. This was a narrative thread that encompassed the entire run of the show. The principal idea evolved around a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of extraterrestrials. Sounds juicy - and for a few glorious seasons it was magical television, tidbits of information revealed by key characters uncovering yet more of this all-encompassing plot to bring about the end of civilisation as we know it.

To paraphrase Edmund Blackadder, there was, unfortunately, one fatal flaw in their plan. It was bollocks. By the end of the ninth and final season, the show's creator Chris Carter was ringing fans up to figure out just what the hell was going on. Turns out the fans had about as much idea as a straight man in Habitat. The series ended on a farcical kangaroo court two-parter, where David Duchovny spent a steady ninety minutes outlining exactly what it was that didn't make sense. Left behind in the rubble was the hope of keeping the reputation of the series intact, and one damaged young man who vowed never again to indulge the ramblings of madmen.

So it was with a heavy heart that I avoided Lost. Like the plague. During the first couple of seasons, LCD exposure of more than ten minutes at a time was unacceptable. One time I got through half an hour, feeling myself sucked in by the strangely magnetic presence of the Jack Osbourne lookalike and the bald man who, quite clearly, had lost it a long time ago and wasn't getting it back any time soon. There also appeared to be a very large black man with a big staff who definitely, at some point, was about to kick serious ass. I felt like Homer watching the little white-suited karate man: 'But, Marge, that little guy hasn't done anything yet. Look at him. He's going to do something and you know it's going to be good.' By casting my mind back to those horrible final seasons of The X-Files, I was able to tear myself away. Now, with the show enduring Battleships-style potshots from critics and fans alike, it seems like the wise choice. Even my brother, an avid Lost fan, has let the current series float away on the airwaves. One of the biggest shows on TV is succumbing to The Show Must Go On syndrome.

The incubation period of the syndrome is long, perhaps terminally so. Programmes can go through three, sometimes even four seasons before they begin to display initial symptoms. The first is viewer dissatisfaction. In the creation of a mythology, a fine balance must be struck between questions and answers. Too many answers, and it begins to lose its mystique. Too few, and the viewer begins to lose interest and feel cheated. This is what's happening to Lost. Although J J Abrams and co. claim to have some kind of eight-season plan in hand whereby everything will be revealed, there comes a point when fanboys register how unwieldy the myriad story threads have become. I can already predict a similar outcome for new show on the block Heroes. Creating a mythology, especially in the geeky science fiction genre, is an excellent way to forge viewer loyalty, but only if you give the viewer what they want.

It's beginning to sound like too fine a line. Yet some shows have succeeded. Babylon 5, for instance, was widely considered to be an incredibly well executed story arc. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine also settled into a beautifully conceived mythology in its final few seasons. The difference is, these were niche shows. Originally aiming for broad appeal, they eventually whittled their audience down to the die hard few. They worked because they wrote for a fanbase. With a show like Lost, the phenomenon has outweighed the original premise. It has entered popular culture in a way that the initial remit never really catered for. Mythologies simply don't work across a wide demographic. To fulfil their promise, they must filter down their audience into those who understand, and are willing, to follow the show to its conclusion.

More than this, there has to be a conclusion, and the audience must feel aware that this is so. Where Lost has gone wrong is in its insistence on creating this massive, incomprehensible world of flashbacks and randomness. There is never that sense of resolution of parts, which are in turn vital components of the still unknown whole. If you want your viewers to invest in your programme, you have to pay out the occasional dividend.

There will never be a ratings smash based on a thought through, put together mythology. By establishing a long running, insular world of references and unsolved puzzles, creators of great television would acknowledge that they need to go after an audience who will be receptive to the mythology they have created. If you go the Lost route, you will end up floundering and your show will crash and burn like a broken airplane. There's still time for Abrams to turn it around. All he needs to do is identify the viewers who are still asking the questions, and tailor his answers to them and them only. Maybe then he won't have to ring the fans to find out what's going on.

Slightly More Than Two Pints of Lager..

2007-03-01T18:30:00.000Z

Helen Parton raises a glass to BBC2’s midweek schedule.

Watching Never Mind the Buzzcocks(10pm, BBC2) with one’s beer goggles on is probably like watching Gardeners World while donning wellies, or I dunno, wearing a policeman’s uniform when watching The Bill (y’see how you can really ruin a good opening line by running out of analogies to back it up).

In contrast to this blog’s previous review, I love this show. And I love it even more when I am as pissed as some of the their recent contestants have been – Amy Winehouse slurring all over the place and Donny Tourette going awol have been some of the best TV moments of the year, racialist (sic) outbursts on Celebrity Big Brother notwithstanding.

Last night, Simon Amstell presided over guests including Nick (the slightly mardy, duckfaced one, not the ruddy cheeked one) from Kaiser Chiefs, Dom Joly and Sinitta, the latter of whom seems to achieved such a marvellous anti-ageing job that Celebrity Beauty Editor Nadine Baggott and Andie ‘is it raining, I hadn’t noticed’ MacDowell must be seething. And, partial as I am to duck-faced drummers, it was Jonas Armstrong a.k.a. Robin Hood a.k.a. Joe Cole who brought some serious eye candy to the proceedings – so much so, looking done at my wobbly scrawl in red biro I appear to have written ‘Tottytastic’ . Clearly, I have missed my calling on more! magazine. Armstrong bore the brunt of most of the gags: ‘It’s Robin of Hollyoaks’ ‘C’mon guys, we’ve all had some mead’ and did it with the good grace that Preston Ordinary Boy (never has a band name surname seemed more apt) would do well to learn from.

My favourite part of the show, the identity parade, did not disappoint and I found myself thinking as Rik Waller stepped forward that he did have lovely flowing locks and quite a nice face after all – Christ how many had I had? Too many to prevent myself from falling off the sofa at one point, that’s for sure.

I’ve missed quite a few episodes of Party Animals (9pm, BBC2), now, which is a real shame – as far as I can tell just about everyone is shagging each other now and I can’t keep my eyes off of both ferrety faced Danny Foster and his brother Scott. However, more interestingly, this is what I found out about the woman who plays the slutty journalist, Clemency Burton Hill (what kind of a name is that for chrissakes!): ‘Clemency got a First in English at Cambridge. She's been a model and a journalist and has appeared in a number of shows including Hustle and Midsomer Murders’

A cure for cancer and achieving world peace is surely on the cards for her next career move presumably? Still, bet she couldn’t drink Winehouse or me under the table.

Not so happy and too many hours

2007-02-20T22:35:00.000Z

Nick Yates gets an insider look at the weekend's latest late night TV

Like some kind of fame parasite, the Al Murray look-alike sat on the back row of the auditorium wearing the sort of contorted grin that suggested he’d just done a particularly satisfying poo.

His presence in the audience at the filming of an episode of Al Murray’s Happy Hour (Friday and Saturday nights, ITV1) raised several questions. Was this middle-aged baldie, dressed in an outfit carefully put together in homage to the comedian’s right-wing pub landlord persona, a regular in audiences for Al Murray’s shows? If so, what was in it for him?

Because sitting through nearly four hours of Happy Hour being filmed – as I did last Tuesday at ITV’s headquarters in Southwark, London – was certainly not an experience most sane people would want to repeat in a hurry.

I thought I’d give the whole live audience member thing a pop after being offered a freebie for the event. I was underwhelmed. The evening involved 20-minutes of stand up by Murray. This was presumably a kind of payment to the audience for turning up because it didn’t seem to be getting filmed. A good deal up to this point.

However, what happened for the rest of the evening was another comedian acted in the role of a porn film’s fluffer, keeping the audience entertained and up to the job between periods of filming. Sadly, all this comprised was a series of gay jokes. His wearying sign-off line was, as I remember, ‘bums in; chests out; girls, throw them over your shoulder; boys, tuck them into your socks’.

In a slick operation, the audience was herded into seating, urged to laugh like goons and clap uproariously even if the comedy wasn’t comic. The guests they had lined up were chat show icon Jerry Springer, page three beauty Linda Lusardi… and Len Goodman. Worst of all, we were forced to make like an appreciative concert audience to a miming Lemarr and backing band. There have been, and surely will be, better rosters of stars during this series of Happy Hour.

The episode was filmed in sections determined by where the ad-breaks will fall. The links, the quips that Murray as presenter uses to introduce the show and each guest, were repeated over and over until perfected – each time with us reminded ‘bums in, chests out’, you know the rest.

While I like Murray’s racist and misogynistic pub schtick as much as the next man, his interaction with the guests was constrained by a rigid script. The bits that were obviously improvisation hinted at the real reasons why he has won the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award.

But, hell, why I am telling you about it? Judge for yourself when Happy Hour is broadcast (Saturday, ITV, 9:50 pm and Friday, ITV, 11pm).

We were assured by the fluffer that footage of the audience would make up ‘80 per cent of the episode’. Look out for my forced laughs about 10 rows below a fat man dressed in a red blazer, white shirt and tie

A Fish Needs a Bicycle

2007-02-19T12:45:00.000Z

Helen Parton looks over Sunday night’s TV with more than a little bile against the unfairer sex

By rights, I should hate Top Gear (8pm, BBC2). It’s presented by men for a start, and I’m none too keen on them at the moment (I’ve not turned lesbian or anything, I’ve just come over a bit ‘I-got-to-thinking-were-all-men-schmucks’ Carrie Bradshaw stylee). And not just any men, but bawdy, sexist, middle class Tory voting men. Well, that’s Clarkson neatly summed up – Richard Hammond’s clearly a nice guy and James May as docile as an elderly spaniel, which is handy ‘cos that’s what he looks like too.

I kind of like all the torque talk, carburetor chat and turning a Robin Reliant into a spaceship, don’t ask me why. I was mainly watching this episode though for special guest star in a reasonably priced car Simon Pegg (my erstwhile TV crush before Noel Fielding appeared on our screens and I started stalking him around Camden). Success seems to have turned Pegg into a bit of a smug idiot sadly. And Clarkson’s assertion that 4x4s were now uncool because, ‘socialist women hate them and they’re better in the bedroom than Tory women’ plus ‘there’s very little room in the back of this Porsche 911 but you’ll have thin children anyway, because driving this means you’ll have a thin wife’ did stick in my craw, so I speedily turned over to Leewiiiiiiiiiiiiiis (ITV 1, 9pm). I defy anyone to read the title of this post-Morse comeback for the Oxford constabulary in any other fashion than John Thaw’s exasperation at his sidekick’s inability to appreciate the finer things in life like classical music, stout etc.

The Geordie philistine needn’t fear in this new series, because now he has his own mini Morse in the form of Sergeant Hathaway (played by current Billie Piper knobber Laurence Fox) who has a neat line in Nietzsche, classic mythology and, er, phoning up sex lines in order to catch the woman responsible for the demise of a group of self-satisfied middle aged blokes who’d murdered her friend during their drug addled youth so they could remove her adrenal gland and get high on the contents (and you thought the infamous Morse ‘rave’ episode was a substance too far).

Strong stuff for a Sunday night - as was Meerkat Manor (6pm, BBC2). And you thought it was all fluffy-wuffy creatures living happily ever after? Not so – the alpha female Flower has not only banished her one daughter Tosca from the entire group for challenging her authority, but she made another one, Daisy, leave her pups to die when the group moved burrows. Whether mendacious meerkat or murderous cleaner just remember, boys, hell hath no fury….

Never Mind the cocks

2007-02-18T21:50:00.000Z

The latest series of Buzzcocks marks its progression from the tedious to the merely banal, says Television Review's latest columnist Daniel Stour

TV Highlight if the Week, as Harry Hill might say: well, hardly a screen-shattering experience but we have to take what we can get, don't we? Never Mind The Buzzcocks, the pop panel show equivalent of an elderly dog begging to be put down,was almost worth watching for once as rent-a-celeb singer Samuel Preston, having achieved the notable feat of being more tedious than the show he was appearing on, threw a cartoon strop and walked out after being teased about his wife's literary prowess. New presenter Simon (ex-Popworld) Amstell has at least injected some hostility into the show's dying format, which otherwise continues to rely upon a succession of dull rounds and insipid guests.

Team captain Phil Jupitus is still with us, sadly, whileBill Bailey sits bemused and possibly drugged, like someone's dad held hostage by a gang of jabbering kids. Having been tipped off about this week's incident I made an effort to watch the whole sordid thing. Preston's self-awareness-bypass was soon apparent; after some early jibes he pointed his origami face towards Amstell and declared himself upset. And when, to everyone's amusement, the host began reading aloud quotes from his wife Chantelle's searingly banal autobiography, the Ordinary Boy looked about as happy as a freshly pissed-on lamppost.

'Haven't you read it? I don't want to spoil the ending for you,' quipped Amstell; but as he embarked upon a second excerpt Preston got up and stomped off, presumably to demand another outlet less offensive to his artistic vision, such as a last-minute spot on All-Star Supermarket Sweep, maybe. A replacement team member was recruited from theaudience, a reluctant young borehole driller called Ed who instantly overtook the rest of the Buzzcocks panel by virtue of a) having a real-life skill; and b) not spraying the studio with human beatbox saliva. One ofthe more successful half-hours of trash TV, then.

The review what said a programme were good

2007-02-13T15:24:00.000Z

The titles are as stupid as the plot of Eastenders, but Five has proved with last night's film about a deformed Ugandan boy, that it can make documentaries as well as anyone, says Mark Lewis.

Had George Orwell called it ‘the bloke what got tortured with a big rat in a scary room,’ then ‘1984’ might not have been the transformative novel it was destined to become. No doubt it would have seen print, but it would have been the print of a third rate publisher – a Channel 5 of the book world, if you will.

Yet the words would have been no different. And so it was in the latest of Five’s Extraordinary People series. The title might be more infantile than a shitty nappy, but The Boy With A New Head (Monday, Five, 9pm) could almost have been on BBC1.

It would come as no surprise, in fact, if the scriptwriters for the BBC’s flagship soap opera turned out to be moonlighting as the Channel 5 documentary-naming department.

For while The Boy With A New Head told the story of a 13-year-old Ugandan boy whose life-threatening birth deformation is corrected by a series of American operations, Eastenders (Monday, BBC1, 8pm) had just been telling the story of a doctor who encourages her husband to continue an affair with his mistress in order to gain custody of her unborn child.

The pictures of the gruesome operation on the Five documentary, during which Petero’s face was rolled up and down his skull like a rubber grip rolled off a cricket bat handle, would almost certainly have been scaled down on the BBC. But this was otherwise an uplifting tale of a near-impossible life transformed by medical science, compared with the utterly improbable stupid plots served up by bad actors on Eastenders.

There was, for sure, more than a touch of the colonials about it, as scientific curiosity replaced the religious zeal which Orwell would have recognised from the missionaries which ventured to Burma when he was a policeman there in the 1940s. And there was a transparent comparison at work as the bullied boy whose eyes petruded from his face like red-glazed snowballs and whose head pointed up in the shape of a cone, came to Texas and discovered ‘the machine which cooks food,’ and ‘the machine we keep food in.’

It was, nevertheless, difficult not to sympathise with his desire by the end to leave the country where a Witch Doctor said his life would be saved by the blood of two sacrificed chickens, in favour of the country which saved his life and furnished him with a new face. ‘The most amazing thing were the doors which open by themselves,’ he told the, now friendly, Ugandan children on his return. At 13, he’s on the brink of discovering that in his life doors are more likely to remain shut.

The Truth About last night's TV

2007-02-08T22:44:00.000Z

The only good reason to have watched Liza Tarbuck on BBC2 was to avoid her on ITV1, says Mark Lewis

It’s rich to be told what we should be eating by The Truth About Food (9pm, BBC2) when the first thing the programme tries to make us swallow is the fact that Liza Tarbuck (pictured) is in good shape. ‘I like to look after myself,’ she says. Which is about as convincing as Ian Brady saying he likes to look after kids.

She ambles through an hour of joyless pseudo science, swatting away signs of interest with her bingo wings while a non-threatening voiceover man addresses the audience as if we’re stupider than an average ITV1 viewer.

The soft midlands accent slowly delivers scientific platitudes with exaggerated EMPHASIS on every COUPLE of WORDS making the programme seem like its narrated by Simon Schama with a lobotomy after a coaching session from Jeremy Clarkson.

But even a lobotomised Clarkson would turn his nose up at narrating a programme, which spun-out an hour to tell us that tomatoes and spinach are good for you, detoxes don’t work and boozing on an empty stomach gets you jolly smashed. Not to mention having to introduce such luminaries in the field of nutrition as an alcohol scientist and a doctor of berry research.

In fact, the only reason to have watched The Truth About Food is to have avoided watching ITV1 at the same time, where Tarbuck - looking unsettlingly like her dad, Jimmy - was scheduled against herself in hour-long comedy-drama, Bonkers (9pm, ITV1). The scheduling prevented me from actually watching it. But just calling a programme Bonkers is the televisual equivalent of a comedy tie.

Party Like It's 2007

2007-02-01T23:48:00.000Z

Helen Parton's a lady not for turning when it comes to praise of this new political drama

Politics always reminds me of great times being a smug student, sitting in a grotty pizza parlour in Hull watching Tony Blair storming into power while my then best friend, a Tory, sulked. But I won't go on about how good things were then in 1997, before myspace, microscooters and the Arctic fucking Monkeys (yes I'd rather hear about the Arctic Circle too, Gordon, you got that one right).

Because ten years on the makers of This Life have given us Party Animals (9pm, BBC2) a new drama about the personal and professional lives of a select bunch residing in the palaces of Westminster. Mostly being smug. And despite all my initial misgivings, it's good.

You wouldn't have thought there was room for it in the BBC schedules either, given the sublime Thick of It's return not so long ago and the fact that the This Life reunion was such a fuck up.

It begins with the likeable but undeniably ferrety faced Danny, a Labour researcher, leaving a key speech in some pub toilets the night before his Blair Babe boss was due to deliver it. Another equally ferrety faced Tory researcher (clearly you have to look like a northerner would want to shove you down their trousers to get on in parliament these days) steals it, thus giving his boss the chance to get one over in the House. Cue a huge bollocking from the (obligatorily Scottish) chief whip.

For a first episode, it's a bit try-hard and the cultural reference points are a bit in-yer-face - look they are PLAYING THE SCISSOR SISTERS in the pub, then the two lobbyists are TAKING COCAINE and people are DRINKING CONTINENTAL LAGER and SHAGGING. But you do begin to care what happens to these characters fairly quickly - whether that's sympathising with the hapless yet passionate Danny or wanting the Tory MP to get his comeuppance for shagging his researcher. And the hollowness and self-serving attitudes of all who walk the corridors of powers are beautifully nuanced from the sharp suits, even sharper dialogue through to the endless series of portraits of Tony and (call me) Dave bearing down from the walls. And as for the journalist who is portrayed as a posh, slightly slutty shameless networker - well that's not exactly inaccurate either.

The action all comes to a head when the party hard lobbyist gets killed, not something I could have seen coming - and neither could the taxi driver who ran him over, ho ho! That’s not to say there’s not things I’d like to change – the Blair Babe MP, played by ‘er what was in the first series of Teachers’, looks a bit too mumsy to be that bitchy and frankly the lobbyist guy that didn’t get killed should spend more time with his shirt off, but apart from that (ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE PUN ALERT!) it gets my vote.

Big Brother's Block Buster

2007-01-30T19:37:00.000Z

In the first of a series of reviews lamenting the end of Celebrity Big Brother, Lucien Mettommo casts the movie

So Celebrity Big Brother has ended. And as we all suspected, us English just don’t cut it when it comes to being generally sound. We all know it: The top three finishers in the latest series all hailed from foreign climes.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s because the majority of English people in this series would be unwelcome at a Millwall game. Escorted, they would be, from the ground by Robert Kilroy Silk for being too bigoted and overly tanned to be acceptable in the circles of racist society. For Heaven’s sake, Teddy ‘I like Dentist chairs’ Sheringham even dumped Miss UK, Daniele Lloyd over her antics.

Anyway, let’s not linger on the reality of the situation. Isn’t it better that we indulge in a little CBB fantasy and wonder instead which real Celebrities would play the main characters in this year’s show if the spectacle was turned into a Movie?

Let us begin with the winner:

Shilpa: The darling of the show who united the general population and a quarter of the World’s peoples against the spectre of racism and xenophobia. For her truly gracious and diplomatic speech at her victory, she should be played by Sylvester Stallone (or Poppadom or Boubadoop, whatever). Not only is he the darling of Hollywood after he courageously defied the considerable number of sceptics to make a half decent boxing movie at the age of 137, but he also single handedly ended the cold war in rocky 4 with his (barely comprehensible) words.

Jermaine: His unflappably calm demeanour and otherwise Buddha-like qualities, mean that Jermaine would be an obvious fit for Morgan Freeman… and, you know, they are both black. In fact, the film could be entirely narrated by Freeman, in his own God-like style. He could say things like ‘They didn’t expect Leo Sayer to last a night in Shawshank (oh I mean the BB house), but the curly haired entertainer defied them all…”

Dirk: Well surely the Face-man could only be played by one man: Dirk Benedict. The coolest American ever to grace these shores, he was a true legend. He was ‘Face’ and for that reason alone he deserves to play his own character.

Ian: Good old H. I think everyone thought the guy was a bit of a loser before the show started, but he really turned out to be a pretty nice chap. He was also brave to come out as, you know, a bit gay before he entered the House – rather like a dodecahedron coming out as slightly edgy. His wacky antics, if not amusing, were at least a distraction, and, for this reason, his character should be played by Murdoch, or ‘Mad’ Murdoch McLeod as he is known on the A-Team. I’m not trying to reunite the A-Team (although I wish could if only one of ‘em wasn’t dead). I just think Dirk is so cool, he needs a sidekick. Even if he is a crazy fool.

Danielle: Miss UK could only be a vacuous Hollywood bimbo. Fortunately, these are ten a penny in LaLa Land. In the end, it’s a toss up between Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. But Lohan wins out, just because I want Paris to play Jade’s mother’s dead arm.

Jade: I think we should all realise that Jade is no racist. She just doesn’t have the intelligence to develop normal moral responses to intense situations. And for this reason, she should be played by George W. Ouch… political satire.

Cleo: Kenny Everett’s dance partner? What the hell does Kenny Everett’s dance partner mean? And who the fuck is Kenny Everett? The slightly ageing ‘celebrity’ still clinging desperately to her lost youth, whilst never saying anything of substance, should be played by Madonna.

Jo: Or ‘pram face’ as she is known to friends. Her features have been haggard by endless chain smoking. Her charm is unmistakeably absent. There is really only one woman who could play this character, and this is Pam St Clement or ‘Pat from Eastenders’. They could basically be twins.

I don’t care enough about, or indeed remember, the rest. Although I would like Todd Carty or ‘Mark from Eastenders’ to be in it as he looks like he needs a break.

He’s so alive

2007-01-29T18:13:00.000Z

The return of Richard Hammond from near death and Louis Theroux from self-imposed obscurity meant that Sunday night saw the very welcome return of two BBC documentary stalwarts, says Mark Lewis.

Clarkson shouted, James May quietly contemplated whether Clarkson was a bigger twat than wine ponce, Oz Clark, and Richard Hammond didn’t die. The first two we could have indifferently contemplated. The final one we have to be pleased about if only in the hope that it will arrest Hammond’s transformation into Clarkson’s Mini-Me.

On the evidence of the new series of Top Gear (Sunday BBC2, 8pm) ‘Hamster’ was a little thinner; perhaps a bit more fragile, but otherwise pretty much the same. Alas that probably means he will restart his transformation into a fat, curly-haired middle-aged man, despised by anyone who’s ever seen a copy of The Guardian. It also means the welcome return of Top Gear, and the scoop footage of the accident in which Hammond nearly died.

Inevitably the commentary he shot before his crash took on resonance not usually associated with the fripperies of the show. He. still. had. that. Clarkson-esque… staccato delivery, which is always more entertaining than apposite. But phrases like ‘this could be the biggest accident you’ve ever seen in your life,’ and ‘I’m so alive, I’m so alive,’ made him more right… than a 1930s Munich Bier Keller.

He could have been so wrong.

Not so wrong, however, that he could have featured in one of Louis Theroux’s weird weekends.

In The Weird World of Louis Theroux (Sunday, BBC2, 9pm), the unassuming assassin looked back over ten years of exploring unusual characters and persuasions.

It was rather like a long-running sitcom running out of ideas and rolling out a past clips show. (The show reminds us perhaps of the sit-com’s past glories but usually presages a decline in the quality, ending up with Fonzie jumping over a shark in a speedboat).

We hope that it will not be the same for Louis, whose never-let-it-go interviewing style has facades stripped quicker than paint in a Ronseal advert. A rapper, we are told in Theroux’s dad-at-a-disco-style, is ‘also a full time gangster and pimp.’

‘I been doing this since I was 11 years old,’ replies the rapper, pushing a gun into the waistband of his trousers. ‘This is who I am. You un’stand what I mean? For real.’

‘But you could shoot your testicles off.’

This is cringe comedy, which predates The Office and Extras, but because it is delivered in a conceptual documentary also managed to catch the zeitgeist of programmes like Wife Swap. Like the Channel 4 stalwart, the programme caught the imagination, not because of the freaks, but because of the humanity.

The fearless questioning and commentary sets people up for the TV freak show and invites us - mostly rather cruelly - to laugh at them. But Theroux’s genius is allowing for snippets of his victims’ humanity to shine through, layering his programmes with undercurrents of melancholy.

We hope it will survive into next week’s new series.

A lot better than working

2007-01-15T11:41:00.000Z

Big Brian Yates takes a break from a lousy week of work and discovers BBC4

How good is BBC4? In the middle of a week of shit at work, I took some time off to watch Hotel California, from Byrds to Eagles: what a treat! Chris Wilson’s documentary film, tracing the flowering of rock music in LA in the sixties and seventies, featured no one going ‘on a journey of discovery’ (with shots of aircraft taking off and landing to prove it), no simplistic, over-dramatic statements repeated every two minutes, no ego-driven presenter shouting at the camera; this was like reading a grown-up’s book, but with moving pictures . . . and fabulous music.

Then, on Friday, after the shit had hit the fan at work, I needed to watch something, anything, in the half-time interval of Sky Sport’s rugby coverage. A quick channel surf offered me In Concert With . . . (BBC 4, 8.30pm), which turned out to be half an hour of classic BBC footage from 1970 of mighty rock legend Neil Young playing some new songs. The audience sat politely in their amusing seventies fancy-dress as Young sat hunched over his guitar or piano, face screwed into a racing-cyclist’s mask of pain and concentration, pouring out the emotion. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as he slashed at his acoustic guitar and launched into another unknown number. It was Heart of Gold, one of the 50 greatest songs ever. The director pulled one or two fancy seventies tricks, shifting the camera angle and focus to place the giant head of a resting guitar alongside the musician, or overlaying a psychedelic purple Neil Young over the cowboy-brown one and subtly merging them together, but he mostly kept it simple. Thank you BBC4 for bringing a tortured genius into my living room on a Friday night!

(Apparently the second half of the rugby was a thriller!)

Too few twats; too many arms

2007-01-11T10:40:00.000Z

David Cook can't hide his disappointment at the number of limbs in the Celebrity BB House

The most disappointing thing about Celebrity Big Brother so far isn't that none of the celebrities are of any interest at all - although they're not. It's the discovery that famed one-armed lesbian Jackie (and we're going to spell that CORRECTLY, not with that superfluous 'y') has, in fact, got two arms. OK, one of them doesn't work, but there's definitely two of them. We counted. Twice.

Now, in last year's 'normal' BB, the delicate 'keep the interesting people in, no matter how repellent' balance was destroyed by the loathsome Sezer. Jackiey, incredibly, is even worse: she looks, sounds and probably smells like the human embodiment of a local tip. "I'm not arguing!" she argued at Shilpa. "I'm not shouting!" she shouted. "I don't want to fight!" she yelled, ready to fight. "I'm listening to you!" she sniffed, not letting Shilpa get a word in edgeways. Brr. The woman makes Jade look like a saint.

Still, maybe we should keep her in. BB needs a certain level of twatness in the house, and that's sorely lacking since Donny left. ("Maybe he's hiding under the table," scoused Danielle. HE JUST WENT OVER THE ROOF, you utter, utter MORON. How could he POSSIBLY be hiding under the table? Gnngh... Incidentally, today Donny 'edited' the 3am Girls' page in the Mirror. "I'd love to meet Britney - but not until she's got rid of that cellulite on her bum!" Seriously. Rock and fucking roll.)

The rest of them, well... Cleo's mental, but the others are blander than dry Ryvita, especially Jade's boyfriend Jack who's so quiet it's quite possible he doesn't exist. It is quite fun playing the 'Does she have a tooth missing or not?' game with Jo, though, and Jermaine's perma-bemused expression is almost worth the entrance fee alone. But not quite, even though there isn't an entrance fee at all.

And that's it. Real BB can't come round soon enough. TV off.

It flew at the right time

2007-01-05T16:52:00.000Z

Green Wing could have run and run but it bowed out at the top, which is more than can be said for Parky, says Mark Lewis

When you can’t decide which character you like the most in a sitcom you’ve got yourself a terrific ensemble cast. It is the genius of Friends and Scrubs and it’s the reason Green Wing could have run for as long.

But where Green Wing is the superior comedy is that it knew when to stop. Four series in, and the Scrubs characters are beginning to metamorphose like the cast of Eastenders. When storyline supercedes character, it is time to give up the plot. Scrubs remains one of the best reasons to turn on the telly but I fear one more series and Turk is going to be caught sleeping with Sharon in the Arches and be beaten up by his brother Grant.

We will miss Green Wing (Thursday, 10pm Ch4). It was a comedy to which you would gladly dedicate an hour because it wound slapstick, satire, surrealism and straight up comedy like a TV chef juggling endorsement contacts. At close to two hours, last night’s one off finale was a commitment for sure, and having been pushed down the schedule by the introduction of this year’s interminable Celebrity Big Brother it ended at close to midnight.

Feature length is not normally a phrase to raise joy in the hearts of TV viewers, but the thin spreading of melancholy over the script in this final episode was more than enough to sustain tired eyes to the end. It was set in the last few weeks of Mac’s life, but like Friends and the Office before it, the writers knew that we all ultimately wanted a happy ending.

Which is more than can be said for the latest incarnation of Michael Parkinson.

He doesn’t ignore his guests like Frank Skinner, and he doesn’t pull faces at them like Davina. But really, how hard can it be? Michael Parkinson has all the skill of a man who can ask movie stars how they make their portrayals so lifelike and laugh at the jokes of Scottish comedians.

There is no doubt that he manages those arts skilfully, I just wonder whether mastering sycophantic smalltalk means you deserve to have a nationally recognised pseudonym.

Parky, however, has sown his own demise by taking the ITV shilling. Judging by last night’s Michael Parkinson’ Greatest Entertainers (Thursday, ITV, 9pm) he will have suffered the Trevor MacDonald disease within weeks and will be topping and tailing someone else’s report on the unwatched Tonight programme.

This was textbook ITV: pay big money for a star an then flog the career right our them in ill-fitting vehicles. Michael Parkinson’s Greatest Entertainers was the chat show equivalent of Ross Kemp’s Ultimate Force.

It was the last death throes of a fading TV aristocrat whose consummate professionalism and good fortune landed him some of the most sought after guests on the planet. Now he was reduced to telling us over two hours that Fred Astaire was a jolly good dancer; Frank Sinatra could sing a bit, and Billy Connolly had been on his show a lot.

So farewell then, Parky. You’ll be missed by people’s mums. Probably even more so than Green Wing.

This Life, But Not As We Know It

2007-01-03T17:08:00.000Z

Helen Parton finds the ten-year reunion of one of her favourite shows a little hard to swallow.

It was billed as event TV, equalling the denouement of who shot JR but unfortunately This Life + 10 (9pm, BBC2) was more like the first episode of Eldorado: a hell of a letdown. Maybe it’s because this time the characterisation was so clunky as we see our favourite 90s quintet return at the funeral of motorcycle courier (turned dental hygienist!) Ferdy. Anna the successful barrister was believable enough and Miles the ex-pat hotellier sort of fit while Warren had clearly been driven to becoming a life coach after spending so many years as Bergerac’s sidekick on Midsomer Murders.

But Milly the stay at home Mum and Egg the successful novelist? Apparently the scene when Egg is speaking about his book at a press conference was series creator Amy Jenkins’ starting point for this ten-year reunion special. But clearly Jenkins had forgot Egg only wanted to write for a living for about two episodes in the original series, and then found that cooking was far more his forte. As it was, the closest we got to that was Egg being compared to Jamie Oliver for having his life filmed by twentysomething documentary maker Claire. Ah yes, here was a plot device crowbarred in so we could have some more talking head scenes, seeing as nobody was seeing a therapist anymore.

Though God knows they needed to now more than a decade ago – Miles still in love with Anna, Anna having biological clock issues, Warren popping a series of Holby City’s worth of pills. The fact was there was too much ground to cover in eighty minutes and everyone unbelievably dusted themselves off as each mini disaster unfolded – Milly falling off a horse – oh it’s OK, she’s fine and cackling maniacally, Warren overdosing– duh, he only took the one sleeping tablet. Even Miles’s country pile being repossessed wasn’t that bad – at least we didn’t have to see his ghastly cream damask sofa anymore for one thing.

He managed to keep his Portishead and Massive Attack CDs from 1997 I hear and that brings me to another thing – This Life’s music was always spot on and that bit of nostalgic trip hop aside, it’s all gone a bit Pete Tong. We have Egg listening to old Killers and Strokes, when clearly he’d have either gone Q-reading muso with Arctic Monkeys, Dylan, Snow Patrol and Jamie T on repeat, lurched into James Blunt dirge or refused to believe a good record had been made post-Britpop. And don’t even get me started on this particular cringe-inducing exchange. Egg: “Her last boyfriend was one of the Kaiser Chiefs!” Miles: “The what cheeses?”. The TV script equivalent of “Is it raining, I hadn’t noticed.” I’m sure you’ll agree.

I know all the actors schedules are jam-packed these days- Jack Davenport is now playing a swashbuckling Miles in Pirates of the Caribbean in Hollywood having done a turn as a comedy Miles in the truly dreadful Coupling and Andrew Lincoln and Daniella Nardini keep popping up as variations of Egg and Anna in ITV specials, but surely even they knew that forcing the viewer to wolf down a big helping of a one-off instead of say a sensibly sized two parter, would give all concerned televisual heartburn, not to mention a little heartache for what had been top notch, must see telly and was now as dodgy as Miles’ new haircut.

Beefcakes Browns and Baldies

2006-12-29T12:46:00.000Z

Nick Yates picks at the TV not tasty enough for Christmas but too Turky for the New Year.

And so Christmas melts away like the snow used to before global warming. The memory fades of an old, fat, bearded man unloading his sack in children’s bedrooms on the 25th, and family stress reaches the heat of an excessively boiled sprout at this time of year,

The antidote during this period of limbo between Christmas Day and New Year? Well, those clever bods who come up with the programmes threw a whole host of peak time TV at us on Wednesday night in the hope of lifting festive spirits.

In our living room, some slightly past-their-best chestnuts roasted on an open fire and a stereotypical cast of characters gathered around the idiot box. Present and correct was my dad – who regular readers of this site will know as TV Review contributor ‘Big’ Brian Yates, my mum, my brother and my brother’s girlfriend. As ever, they were full of opinions and more than willing to separate the Bad Santas from the Santa Claus: The Movies.

First up was BBC2’s stab at a macho Christmas – Beefcake: A Very British Sex Symbol (Wednesday, BBC2, 9:00). Presenter Tony Livesey (‘who?’) talked bollocks over an hour of looped clips from The Sweeney. He posited the theory that there was a golden age of British TV shows and films in which men were men and birds were birds. The era featured ‘men who could break down doors but never cooked’. But, wait, these guys are now making a comeback with the newly rough Bond and derivative John Simm cop show Life on Mars.

Beefcake had rounded up a host of talking heads, including Germaine Greer, Nick Moran, Britt Eckland, and the co-founder of Loaded (Was James Brown busy?). [He means the James Brown who founded Loaded, not James BrownBread - ed]

The family’s verdict
“Did they put the show together based purely on the has-beens hanging around the pub one particular evening?” wondered my little bro. There indeed seemed to be some very tenuous links made in the narration. The Sweeney’s coppers, we were told, were the original ‘men behaving badly’ as Beefcake segued into an interview with Neil Morrisey tamely agreeing with whatever question was fired at him. Britt Eckland had cameos in two macho films, Get Carter and Bond. ‘She must have needed cash for her latest face lift.” My mum suggested. My dad thought her face was already lifted enough – sitting, as it was, above her actual head.

There was time after this to catch half an hour of The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2006 (Wednesday, Channel 4, 9:00). In their mission to have host Jimmy Carr on the television 24/7, this was a lengthy special edition of the panel game show.

The celebs occupying the hot seats were Noel Fielding, Russell Brand, Cat Deeley, Jonathan Ross, David Walliams and Rob Bryden. It came with a health warning: Woss and Brand in the same room together can cause epileptic fits.

The family’s verdict
Rob Bryden definitely won the battle of the funnymen, it was agreed. The highlight was the cameo appearance by that bloke who mistakenly wound up as a live spokesperson on the news having turned up for a job interview. More of him in 2007 please. My brother’s girlfriend likes Brand’s and Fielding’s hair.

Imagine (Wednesday, BBC1, 10:30) rounded off the night’s viewing. The Beeb’s arts programme took a look at the Las Vegas show Love, a high tech melting pot between The Beatles’ back catalogue and Cirque du Soleil. Time was when you could just listen to Revolver and be done with it. Now, if it’s not re-mixed by an aged George Martin and set to hundreds of acrobats leaping around a stage in octopus costumes, then the Four just aren’t Fab enough.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Star did the hard sell to presenter Alan Yentob.

The family’s verdict
Watching this makes you realise just how good The Beatles are. If it aint broke, don’t fix it, seemed to be the verdict. My mum liked Alan Yentob’s lack of hair.

Public sees past Ray of Shite

2006-12-19T09:38:00.000Z

Never mind the X Factor, more importantly, will Leona have the X-Rated Factor needed to survive pop's maelstrom?

Though the X Factor result is now known – hey it was Leona everyone, hurrah! – some serious questions still lay unanswered.

One, why did Ray Quinn bother to turn up, when the result was so obviously a shoo in?

Because the sadistic little twat wanted us to suffer his sub Robbie Williams crooning (and self satisfied nodding) one last time? Because he had some David Koresh-style plot to make his grey haired cult of fans spontaneously top themselves? It surely couldn’t be because he thought his rendition of the now-sure-to-be-number-one-hit ‘A Moment Like This’ was better than Leona’s could it?

She hit the Mariah top notes and did the Whitney lip wobble and everything to give her credit. But the song’s about as memorable as Shayne Ward’s ‘That’s My Goal’ . Remember him? ‘Exactly’, (as one of Ray’s fellow countrymen said when asked who Accrington Stanley were in that famous milk advert). So has Leona having won the X Factor, really got the X Factor? There’s no doubting she can sing, though I resent the way she seems to have unwittingly convinced everyone that ‘Without You’ is a Mariah Carey song. Over here in pedants corner, can I just point out it is a Mariah Carey cover version of a rather splendid song made famous by Harry Nilsson and written by some old rockers who never made it. Her rendition of Chiquitita was blinding on Abba week and she was note perfect on I Will Always Love You (another cover version by the way, this time of a Dolly Parton song).

But, like Shayne before her, is she not just a bit, whisper it, boring? Not that I’d ever stick up for Chico, but he did have a certain lunatic appeal and creating one’s very own timezone is quite a feat. The Cheeky Girls were appealingly mental and they’ve done alright for themselves – well one of them has now toppled weathergirl Sian Lloyd as the eye candy of Lembit Opik. I was going to write ‘weird Liberal MP Lembit Opik’ but in a party consisting of coffin dodgers, alcoholics and chaps with a penchant for scat-munching rent boys, he doesn’t seem so strange after all. Anyway, you certainly wouldn’t catch Leona going out with him and in my tabloid addled book, that’s a shame.

I want more Cheryl Tweedy punching toilet attendants and Britney going knickerless and a bit less boring Jamelia in my pop stars. We’ll have to wait and see if Leona’s up to the job.

A couple more X Factor questions for you to conclude – is Simon Cowell’s head getting squarer and what is it with Kate Thornton’s nipple? [Actually there was nothing going on with the old hag’s décolletage this week, I just wanted to get the number of hits to the site up again].

A massive blunder

2006-12-08T17:02:00.000Z

E4s cynical attempt to cash in on the catchphrase panflash has failed dreadfully, says Mark Lewis

If I was trying to be a bit clever, I would say Blunder (Thursday, E4, 10pm) is a poor imitation of post-modern comedy four or five years after the onset of post-post-modernism. But that would be shit.

It’s not unlike Blunder (Thursday, E4, 10pm), which is a poor imitation of post-modern comedy four or five years after the onset of post-post-modernism. And shit.

And so it goes on until finally you have a half hour sketch show - or a three hundred word review - so witty it could have been written by Fern Cotton [massive Vernon Kay wink].

Even the show title, is desperately try-hard post-modern: It is either the achingly self-referential brainchild of whoever commissioned this turd, or oh so cleverly poking fun at those of us who somehow don't get the comedy. To point out that the whole exercise is the biggest blunder since Clive Sinclair went, 'fuck reverse gear,' would be to take the deliberately obvious joke.

But at least it is a joke. If this catchphrase comedy appeals beyond the T4 demographic then I’m a half hour of Friends followed by a Hollyoaks omnibus.

The shame is that David Mitchell (who is still funny despite being on the box more regularly than Huw Edwards) has done yet more lousy television. You may remember Mitchell from such comedies as That Mitchell and Webb Thing and Peep Show. Peep Show you will recall was probably the best programme in the world ever. But Mitchell should never have done That Mitchell and Webb thing. And he darn tootin’ shouldn’t have done this.

Sure, he probably didn’t get the same warnings we did from E4s continuity presenter who not only described Blunder as ‘probably the best programme in the world ever’ (Vernon Kay; Fern Cotton, circa 2004), but also told us to get ready for ‘a whole lot of catchphrases to learn and love.’

There was the bloke who says ‘Shuddup’. And that other bloke who says ‘are there any tits in it?’

Then there is the woman so post modern she’s playing one of those funny girls who aren’t funny, unfunnily. Dire dire dire.

Sing-a-long TV

2006-12-06T07:47:00.000Z

The Choir is surprisngly charming, if unoriginal, primetime programming says Ego Odman

Channel 4’s Rock School was programming genius. It capitalised on the success of feel-good flick School of Rock by getting Kiss man Gene Simmons to coach a bunch of Lowestoft school kids for a support slot with Judas Priest. Awesome. In contrast, the concept for BBC2’s Choir (Monday, BBC1, 9pm) sounds like a patronising act of plagiarism that’s come months too late.

The three programmes follow choirmaster Gareth Malone, who wants to turn a group of underprivileged school children into a choir good enough for the Choir Olympics in China. So far, so Sister Act. The problem is, 30-year-old Malone looks about 12 and sounds like he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It’s hard to believe he’ll pull it off.

Malone drives to Northolt for the first time. As the completely normal-looking sixties comprehensive drops into view, he mutters, ‘oh, it’s one of those…’ Malone was educated at Bournemouth Grammer and is astounded to hear the children have no formal musical background. ‘They won’t even understand what mezzo forte means!’ he exclaims.

But what the kids lack in knowledge they make up in enthusiasm, and hundreds queue for X-Factor style auditions. The initial impulse is to laugh at their performances, but empathy wins out as Lisa Joseph, 12, sings a Christina Aguilera song because she empathises with the lyrics, and Enock Chege, 12, kindly offers his ‘best voice and best concentration’. The singing is impressive too.

Malone can only select 25 students, and hits problems when the head teacher bans Chelsea Campbell from singing, because she’s moving schools due to bad behaviour. It feels like the wrong decision, but Malone capitulates. Similarly, the head teacher warns that Chloe Sullivan’s attendance is poor, but Malone takes a chance on this one.

With the choir assembled, Malone books a recording studio so the band can make their competition entry. But the session is just a month away. Malone’s teaching skills are surprisingly good, but confidence is low, Sullivan’s attendance is patchy and Raul Lacman, 13, is out of tune. The camera follows some of the children to their homes, where parents reveal their family problems, but the BBC tone feels invasive and slightly exploitative.

Malone drops his classical ideal in favour of secondary school favourite Can You Feel The Love Tonight from The Lion King, and hopes a field trip to the Barbican centre will help inspire confidence. Sure enough, Malone comes over all Sister Mary Clarence, helping Sullivan to overcome her shyness by performing a solo and bonding the group together.

When the big day arrives the group get a clean take - but Raul is still out of tune. Malone asks him not to sing on the recording, and while the sadness in his eyes is patently obvious, he takes it well. The group are relieved, but there’s two months until they’ll know if they’re going to China. The question is, does anybody care? Surprisingly, yes. By this point, the programme has created a genuine sense of suspense and inspired genuine affection for the kids. It’s just a shame they let Chelsea Campbell fall by the wayside. That’d never have happened in Sister Act.

This Wonderful Life

2006-12-03T20:52:00.000Z

Helen Parton looks back fondly at the drama that defined a decade and hopes its reprise will live up to the original

Forget the Spice Girls or Madonna, in the mid-90s EVERYONE wanted to either be Anna from This Life. Or sleep with her. Or both – hey this was the mid 90s, it was kinda hard to distinguish whether you were into boys or girls – Brett Anderson of Suede looked the same as Justine Frischmann of Elastica after all, and Blur said as much about this gender confusion in the song Boys and Girls.

Great to look at, fascinating, infuriating, addictive – all the qualities that made Anna so great could equally be applied to the whole show. Ten years on, BBC2 are sensibly repeating the whole two series in big double-bill sized helpings. And unlike Trainspotting, which gets more irresponsible and poorly acted the more times you see it, This Life has stood the test of time. Even its sweeping about camera style, which the show was mocked for originally, is now so commonplace in TV I hardly noticed it this time around. The only thing that has dated really is the absence of mobile phones - but then Anna’s doomed romance with Miles would be a bit harder to write if they just texted to say they were late for that vital rendez-vous or apologised for acting like a twat the previous night.

Sorry, I seem to be a bit ahead of myself here for the uninitiated, but writing about This Life is a bit like being given a box of chocolates to oneself. I’m metaphorically tucking into the strawberry and orange creams now, people, bear with me.

OK, let me start from the beginning - This Life tells the story of a house-share of twentysomething lawyers. Milly and Egg are the couple, Anna and Miles the should-be couple, Warren a Welsh gay chap, Ferdy a bisexual who in real life is Tanita Tikaram’s brother. And then in Miles and Anna’s firm there’s Joe who goes out with Keira, who works in Milly’s firm as does Rachel. Egg and Warren used to work there too but both left due to having a career epiphany and ending up working in a caff and getting caught cottaging on Hampstead Heath respectively. Actually it sounds far too PC for its own good written down like that. Except it’s not. The characterization is brilliant – Milly slowly being drawn into an affair with her boss, O’Donnell, the middle aged chap with a Morse-like absence of a first name, and her increasingly hatred for Rachel are particularly vivid. Then there’s the music – chosen by Ricky Gervais, a fact sure to crop up in trendy pub quizzes soon – which makes the whole programme even more evocative of the times. If I’m allowed to be a bit melodramatic here – think of it as halfway through that metaphorical chocolate box now, say a noisette whirl, – it also kind of reminds me of my own mortality. I was a student when I first watched it. I’m thirty now. I’ve lived through my own This Life years in a not entirely dissimilar fashion and I don’t really want to leave them. Who wants Fay Ripley and Hermione wotsit in thirtysomething drama Cold Feet when they can be eternally Daniella Nardini as Anna?

But of course, we are going to get to see what the This Life lot are like as thirtysomethings in the ten-year reunion show (Date To Be Bloody Confirmed by the BBC), which I’m anticipating with much trepidation. I’m just hoping they’re not as fucking boring, mortgage obsessed and musically out of touch as all my thirtysomething mates. Or maybe I should just grow up and put the empty chocolate box in the bin.

The Cook report

2006-11-28T17:22:00.000Z

David Cook casts his eye over last week’s TV, and finds it more unpalatable than a geriatric on X-Factor

If there was ever an advert for shooting yourself the day before your 60th birthday, it was Young@Heart (Wednesday, 9pm, Channel 4). It was meant to be uplifting, but this feature-length (i.e. far too long) documentary about a choir of US pensioners covering contemporary artists – James Brown, Rolling Stones, Coldplay – managed instead to simply bore the viewer into an early grave, with half the choir probably following on behind. Really, while the idea of a crowd of rock’n’roll pensioners might sound sweet, and yes, you’d probably go and see them for a laugh while half-cut on cider and LSD at Glastonbury, actually listening to a couple of dozen octogenarians covering Sonic Youth – Sonic Youth! – makes Jive Bunny sound positively palatable. Chorus leader Bob – looking like a cross between Jesus and Bob Geldof (unlike Bob Geldof, who thinks he is Jesus) tried to inspire the crowd by going ‘Yeah! Great!’ every five minutes, but there’s only so much fun you can have watching an old man massacre the first line of I Feel Good time and time again.

Speaking of music being massacred, Simon Cowell, we beg you, please beat Ray to death before he opens his mouth again. (X-Factor, Saturday, 6.25pm, ITV). Forget the MacDonald Bros, they’re merely rubbish - Ray is actually quite frightening. Really. Look at his slicked back hair, those cold, dead eyes, that stuck-on perma-grin. He is the walking, talking, singing Damian. He is Satan, or if not Satan, then his obnoxious little brother. Please, somebody call Gregory Peck and bring the torture to an end

Top class Sunday night entertainment: don’t bet on it

2006-11-27T17:02:00.000Z

The BBC took a gamble putting it flagship current affairs programme back on its flagship channel. But like a weak poker player, playing an unsure hand, it backed it only half-heartedly, says Mark Lewis.

Appropriately enough, this week’s new-look Panorama (Sunday, BBC1, 10.15pm) was about online gambling. Because the BBC has taken quite a punt.

Gone, for the moment at least, are the serious discussions on serious topics at serious length. The BBC is betting its 10.15pm time slot instead on only being able to attract sufficient viewers if it appeals to the Tonight or Dispatches demographic

Just in case that’s too high-brow for the BBC1-ers, it ran to just 35 minutes. If that wasn’t stupid enough it also featured an interminable wild-west metaphor which went on for at least half the programme. And there was no shortage of stupid people in the programme either.

Apart from the journalist, Declan, who agreed to try to double $2,000 of his own money (which he would in no way claim back from the BBC later), there was also a cascade of simpletons who blamed internet betting for their inability to stop spending money on gambling.

I have a confession: I am a fan of online gambling, and was just polishing off a game of poker when Panorama started. I am also capable of betting moderately - even winning a little perhaps - without endangering my mortgage, or dipping into the savings for that penis extension operation they keep emailing me the details for.

But if I did mess up, I would take responsibility myself and go back to using the Swedish penis pump. Not so the interviewees in this programme.

One woman, a secretary who pilfered £460,000 from her company, blamed her kleptomania on William Hill. (Which was rather like someone with a nut allergy who just can’t resist cashews blaming KP for his head blowing up.) The young mother escaped prison, presumably on the grounds that any company which leaves £460,000 hanging around the staff smoking room probably deserves to have it embezzled. And the woman was told to go to treatment where she was, no doubt, taught to replace her gambling with a less harmful addiction. Like cashew nuts.

I am prepared to give Panorama another chance because I remember occasions when it produced some of the most thoughtful, imaginative programmes on TV. The BBC would do well to remember that it is not obliged to chase ratings.

Otherwise it might as well show things like Heartbeat.

It’s difficult to know what to say about the new series of Heartbeat (Sunday, ITV1, 8pm). Under normal circumstances, I’m as likely to watch primetime ITV1 as Tony Martin is to drink tea and chat about law and order with a chap who’s just offered to tarmac his driveway.

But it’s either:

1. Charming, must-watch Sunday night TV, which breaks the day up perfectly between The Antiques Roadshow and bed time. And it’s got that lovely boy in it who used to be in Eastenders.

Or

2. Unimaginative drivel, that - you have to keep reminding your nan - hasn’t had that bloke from Eastenders in it for about 10 years.

Its gentle drama for sure which, while set in 1950s Britain, features some of the most biting social commentary on TV. This week, a gun-happy former army officer shot a burglar dead in his home, just seven years after Tony Mental Martin did likewise.

There may or may not be more cutting edge social commentary next week, but if I was a betting man, I’d probably avoid it.

Pitch me a winner

2006-11-21T21:48:00.000Z

With so many TV channels existing on a pittance of creative input, it's time to throw in some true, quality, original thinking to enhance our lives. David Davies can pitch with the best of them.

Show: The Ox-Factor
Channel: BBC4
Time: Saturdays, 7.30pm
Pitch: Oxbridge graduates enter a talent competition to see who can spout the most erudite bullshit from a chosen historical document within a set time limit. Those deemed most lucid or layman by the panel are voted off, until the winner is allowed to sit down in a big leather Chesterfield and smoke a pipe for an hour in front of a live audience. The panel includes the only man to ever really bore someone to death, David Starkey, celebrity social cripple Tom Paulin, gay-but-don't-you-just-know-it? Simon Schama and that bloke who went Around the World in 80 Treasures (working title: How I Screwed the Beeb Out of a Few Grand for the Ultimate Sabbatical Jolly).

Show: You C***
Channel: Discovery Home & Health
Time: Weekdays, 10.30am
Pitch: Celebrity wankers and famous bints lay the ego smackdown on your ass. Tune in to see Anne Robinson telling you that you're a worthless, pathetic, inept excuse for a human being. Reel from Jeremy Paxman's accusations of pedantry and ethical ambivalence. Gasp as Jeremy Kyle squats on stage and tells you he could s*** out a nicer looking face than your one you snivelling little c*** you.

Show: Richard Madeley's Happy Hour
Channel: C4
Time: Fridays, 7pm
Pitch: Old dicky gets his own Friday night show in the TFI mould. Freed from the burden of the vibrating wife, Richard can now get down with the kids. Hip guests include Shakin' Stevens, Status Quo, and young up and comers Shed Seven.

Show: I Wouldn't Be Caught Dead With... a Necrophiliac
Channel: Bravo
Time: Weeknights, 9pm
Pitch: Reality TV Show set in a morgue. Stars include Bazza The Toe-Tag Man, Linda The Ashen Receptionist, and Roger The Delivery Man (Read that last one again).

Show: The Impression I Get
Channel: ITV
Time: Saturdays, 8pm
Pitch: Mimics find yet another excuse to appear on TV, this time as dead celebrities hosting axed shows. Double up with laughter as Alistair McGowan presents Top Of The Pops disguised as Tommy Cooper, guffaw as Jon Culshaw does Tomorrow's World as Leslie Crowther, and cackle at the insane genius of Rory Bremner hosting This Is Your Life as Bob Mills. I know he's still alive, but it's okay to dream. When will these people realise they're better on the radio?

Show: The Top 100 Top 100s
Channel: C4
Time: One-off special, Sunday, 9pm-5am
Pitch: Jimmy "Jammy Dodger Face" Carr presents a countdown of Channel 4's Top 100 Top 100s. Who can forget the fantastic Top 100 Boy Band Haircuts, Top 100 Reasons To Despise Russell Brand, or the infamous Top 100 Reasons Why Rolf Harris Must Have a Dirty Little Secret? As always, the show will be rife with less than minor celebrities pontificating about the cultural significance of totally insignificant events whilst reminding us all what a bunch of freeloading, useless waste of space tossers they all are. Wayne Hemmingway, Moby's stylish older brother, will find time to poke his nose in there, even though he's the first and only man to ever design a radio with a neck and should therefore be prevented from doing anything ever again.

Show: Ginger Spice's Through The Keyhole
Channel: C5
Time: Thursdays, 11pm
Pitch: Geri Halliwell - she's not dead yet - presents a fascinating weekly look into keyhole surgery. Follow the camera into Mr. Barnet's lower intestine, where doctors find a human skull and the whole thing kicks off in the craziest way possible. No, but really, this show is educational and informative, and includes lots of clever punchlines from the killer nugget and a look at Mrs. Croydon's bunghole.

It's a veritable goldmine of ideas. If any of you TV execs out there are reading this, you know what to do. That's right, rip me off and sell the idea as your own. Damn you all to hell.

Top TV detectives podcast

2006-11-19T20:11:00.000Z

Download TV Review's second podcast - it's free!

In the second TV Review Podcast, Mark Lewis hosts a panel discussion show which puts to bed forever the debate about who tops Britain's top ten TV detectives. Joining him are Ben Watkins, Richey Nash and Nick Yates. Download and enjoy.

Format: MP3

click here to listen now or right click to download and savour later

No Laughing Matter

2006-11-16T21:15:00.000Z

Richey Nash says there's a gaping hole in the schedules where innovative Brit sitcom should be

British sitcom is stuck in a rut and it’s going to take more than the latest offerings from Jack Dee and Ricky Gervais to save it. Okay, so Lead Balloon and the second series of Extras are both groundbreaking in terms of what this country’s produced before. Both Dee and Gervais are playing fictional characters that are, essentially, worse versions of who they are in ‘real life’: surly struggling stand-up Rick Spleen and struggling sitcom scribbler Andy Millman respectively. But we’ve seen both done before and done better.

Jack Dee is only just starting to bring to the sitcom what Larry David has been doing for over five years with Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Larry David did it better. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Jack Dee, but his show doesn’t quite ring true. Is his best friend in real life really an annoying pearly-toothed American? I doubt it. And in any case, there’s always the knowledge that Dee isn’t being Dee, just a ripped-off reconstituted version of himself.

In CYE, on the other hand, you believe that Cheryl is Larry’s wife and you believed Jeff is his manager. And because Larry David is playing Larry David, you believe more in the main character too. If you are going to have people getting into awkward situations, then the more believable they are, the better.

And the second series of Extras harks even further back, to Larry David’s other masterpiece: Seinfeld. This year Gervais has written a show about a guy writing a really bad sitcom, but Seinfeld was doing it better in 1992.

Gervais is using the sitcom in Extras to take the piss out of bad sitcoms. But when Seinfeld and George Costanza go to NBC in the third episode of the fourth series and pitch a ‘show about nothing’, it is clear they are also taking the piss out of the show they are already on.

If it were a competition to find the funnier idea, Seinfeld would win easily. First, audiences warm to self-deprecation. And second, laughing at Seinfeld makes the audience feel clever while laughing at Extras makes the audience feel stupid. On the rare occasions I felt like laughing at the second series of Extras, I had an ominous feeling that Gervais would push his finger through the TV and castigate me for doing so.

Ultimately Lead Balloon and Extras have shown that sitcom has gone too far towards the ‘sit’ and away from the ‘com’. While the jokes were as important as the situations in The Office and I’m Alan Partridge, now the jokes have been sidelined as we try to watch people try to squirm out of awkward situations. But watching the squirming is not always funny so ideally there should be something more.

But trying to imitate what Larry David has done shows up a far bigger problem for British TV comedy: there aren’t any mavericks. Chris Morris used to be held up as one, but is unlikely to ever come back with anything as good as The Day Today or Brass Eye.

So who is out there doing something completely fresh? The League Of Gentlemen have started making crap films, the Father Ted guys have lowered themselves to The IT Crowd, and though Peep Show is good, at heart it’s really quite conventional. And while The Thick Of It was good, will it ever return? Nobody knows. But one thing is clear: in a world where Little Britain can sell out stadia, where you can’t get through a night of TV without being confronted by Jimmy Carr’s evil insidious presence, then something is dreadfully wrong.

New Horizons

2006-11-15T10:07:00.000Z

David Davies laments the lack of science on the BBC’s flagship science programme

Horizon was always great because it was never afraid to throw you in at the deep end before teaching you how to swim. There was a kind of inconsiderate edge to it, a challenge to the viewer. Its slogan was 'Pure science, sheer drama'. With this new series, the difficulties have gone. Much like almost any other show on TV, I could let my brain idle along without having to worry about what I had just seen, explained concepts or abstract terminology.

Take the show from two weeks ago which was all about cars that could drive themselves across 130 miles of rough desert terrain. How many producers are wishing right now that they'd pitched that as a programme synopsis?

Bill Nighy gave the kind of voiceover Ian McShane dreams about, his pronunciation of 'DARPA' a particular highlight. It was like listening to a camp version of the Emperor from Star Wars. The usual variety of geeks included a righteous Napoleon Dynamite character who reckoned his self-righting motorbike was, like, the coolest thing ever. My favourite was Sebastian Thrun, who look as if he was germinated in some weird scandinavian greenhouse. Shortly after winning the race with the classy 'Stanley' off-roader, he declared that 'everyone's a winner', something I doubt he would be saying had he lost.

Speaking of losers, his nemesis William 'Red' Whittaker was nothing if not thorough, pitching two robots into the battle, 'Highlander' and 'Sandstorm'. Doesn't bode well for the family tree. Apart from committing the ultimate nerd faux pas of quoting the A-Team ('I love it when a plan comes together') this ex-marine seemed like the kind of ballbreaker that really gets the job done. Which made it all the sweeter when he lost to Moby lookalike of the year 2006, Sebastian.

There were numerous highlights, most of them provided by the robot motorbike 'Ghostrider'. It really was so much fun watching the sheer desperation on Napoleon Dynamite's face as the bike careered, collided, skidded and slid its way through a variety of increasingly hostile situations. The best moment was a replay of the previous year's challenge, when the very same guy had forgotten to turn on the bike's stabiliser. Five feet from the starting line it wobbled, before crashing and burning in a quite spectacular fashion considering it was doing around 3mph. The show was so entertaining it left barely enough room for the science.

In fact, the closest it got to hard science involved some elaborate CGI overlays of what the car was 'seeing'.

It's disappointing. It's not a one off either. The week before, it referred to some 'singularity', a kind of uber-bollocks delineation of an all-powerful computer mind. Never heard that one before. Danny I'm-beating-Dave-Gorman-at-his-own-game Wallace, the first on-screen presenter in Horizon's 40-year history, was entertaining but again lacking in substance.

I think the new look of the show is superbly executed, the accompanying website is informative a wide-reaching, and the more recognisable voices and personalities are welcome. I just wish it had a bit more of the geek still left in it. Talking heads are the ace in Horizon's pack, the points at which hard science can be explained by real people with comprehensible analogies. In this series, all we've learnt is that Danny Wallace was struggling with ethics and some guy was disappointed that his robot bike fell over. Why did it fall over? What was it that made the self-righting mechanism fail? Was it to do with the tunnel? Did the sensors break? What were the ultimate advantages held by Thrun's team over Whittaker's? None of these questions was satisfactorily answered, and they would have been in past editions. Instead we got empty reaction shots like 'everyone's a winner' and Napoleon Dynamite's 'I hope they don't do it for a third year because I don't want to go through all this again'.

I'm not advocating a return to the old-fashioned style of previous editions. What I want is a return to the old-style content delivery. There were moments in the last series when I was left scratching my head, wondering what to make of it all, where to go to understand more. So far, with this series, I haven't had a single question left unanswered. Surely this is the audience Horizon should be aiming for, the pro-active viewer who goes out and learns more about what are undoubtedly fascinating subjects. Without Horizon I wouldn't have been introduced to the brilliance of Michio Kaku, weird multiple universes, the awe-inspiring concepts of supervolcanoes, or the ultimate paradox of time travel. Horizon is called Horizon because it's a programme in which the layman can understand the cutting edge of science, given access into the scientific world minus the dullness of algebra, explained in an interesting and often dramatic way. You can take away the science and still make it entertaining, but do we really want the flagship science show on television to go all Scrapheap Challenge on us? It might be fun for now, but it will soon tire.

Sunday's must watch TV

2006-11-12T12:53:00.000Z

David Attenborough's Planet Earth is a fine way to round off the weekend, says Emma Mitchell

This is a good programme to have on Sunday evenings. David Attenborough makes science interesting whilst as understandable as possible. Last time we explored the Arctic and the Antarctic, discovering what life could survive the extreme temperatures.

We met the penguins, and they are funny little creatures. I'm seriously considering one for a pet. They waddle about and then when they're feeling tired, they just slide around on their bellies - fantastic! The way they all huddle together for warmth was impressive, then when the females return with bellies full of food, the racket the males make is hilarious. It's actually like they are cheering.

Then we went to the Arctic to see some polar bears, which i thought would be nice, until they showed one male bear swim for four days because the icy land he hunts on had melted away to such a degree that he had nowhere left to stand that'd support his weight. After four days of swimming, he chances upon a herd of walruses (is that the collective term for them? Maybe it's gaggle? A gaggle of walruses…..anyway I digress), but unsurprisingly he was pretty damn tired. We watched as he tried in vain to get just one meal, and let's be honest, I was cheering him on because the walruses could spare one or two anyway, only to be met with an impenetrable mountain of blubber. Not a pretty sight.

We watched the poor bear limp away and then just curl up on the rocks, from sheer exhaustion and starvation, and pass away. Not what I wanted to see, and I'm not ashamed to say it even brought a little tear to my eye, as it's probably our fault this sort of thing is happening. Thanks BBC for reminding us.

I was suitably cheered up by seeing a female bear emerge from her cave with her two little cubs and slide down the hill, she looked liked she didn't have a care in the world. My uplifted mood wasn't to last though. We went back to the penguins only to see a group of little fluffy penguin nippers, who were lost in the snow, get completely wiped out. This was turning into a blood bath.

Having left the room for about five minutes to recover, I watched the Planet Earth Diaries, which is always interesting. They spent a year in the Antarctic, bet their husbands and wives were pleased:

'Hi Darling, just got a new research job come through today.'
'That's wonderful, where is it and how long will you be gone for?'
'It's the Antarctic, for a year, and we're leaving tomorrow.'
'Oh right, ok then!' Or something like that.

Anyway, they had this hut in the middle of literally nowhere and this polar bear that took a great interest in the hut, even firing off flares wasn't scaring him away. At one point, he even had his cheeky big black nose pressed up against the window - imagine that greeting you first thing in the morning when you pull the curtains back! Well they couldn't get rid of the bear and then the programme ended; I honestly believe they may well have had to destroy the bear, but graciously didn't show this on TV. Guess that's life. Well roll on next week's one!

When Will I See Freeview Again?

2006-11-09T22:46:00.000Z

Helen Parton is now all by herself with terrestrial after a brief dalliance with a set top box

As flings go, it’s had its moments in the past ten days I have to admit, but really, dear reader, it hasn’t left me satisfied, and I now feel slightly…unclean.

I speak not, regrettably, of a passionate affair with the hunky friend of my flatmate of his temporary tenure here, but of my relationship with his Freeview box, which came to stay too.

Oh for the novelty value of the early days of hour after happy hour of old CSI or endlessly repeated Razorlight videos on The Hits. But familiarity does indeed breed contempt and soon enough I was lampooning E4 for always having Hollyoaks on and cruelly dubbing ITV3 ‘The Poirot Channel’. Don’t think we didn’t have our moments…that afternoon spent on the sofa under a duvet with a Lemsip and a low-brow highpoint (lowpoint?) of the OC followed by Jeremy Kyle and dating tips from Sky Three was pure square-eyed nirvana.

It was when I found myself rolling around the floor last night, a remote in each hand caterwauling “why isn’t it working” when I had indiscriminately pressed the mute button then the install button, that I knew that our relationship had hit the rocks. Now I realise how Su Ellen or Carrie Bradshaw felt when JR and Mr Big had been respective bastards. Fortunately a friend whisked me out to dinner and when I returned, we made up. Well, by that I mean I found a good film on Film Four that I hadn’t actually seen. But the honeymoon period was over and I couldn’t even concentrate on proper telly for more than five minutes without thinking there might be something better on, oooh I don’t know, the History Channel or something.

Perfect Day: The Funeral (9pm, Five) looked good in a Four Weddings/Cold Feet hybrid kind of a way but my concentration span was spent. I knew there was goodness, well so bad it’s goodness to be had with Goldplated (Channel 4, 9pm, and also E4 for about three hours after it seems) but again I could only get through a couple of scenes of Cheshire melodrama.

There was only one thing for it: gorge myself on as many mad channels as I could while I had the chance – QVC and its enticing-after-as-much-red-wine-as-I’d-had ‘Illuminated Music Box’ for just £14.77. A pair of middle-aged women somewhere were offering Ladies Fly Flot Leather One Touch Clogs for £24.99 (not sure I quite scribbled that down correctly in case you want to order them). Or there was always Master of Chavs (I suspect Master of Charades, but I can’t read my writing here either) (Five US, Christ Only Knows What Time) where a woman was performing a move she’d never done before with burning candles. And finally, whatever the opposite of a plethora is, of TV quiz channels – a lime-shirted buffoon on The Hits, a kind of pikey, Brookside-handsome man on ITV Play, a low rent Nikki from Big Brother on Quiz Call asking people to call in to answer the other half to the phrase ‘Water____ ‘(one wonders how many dirty old pervs were restrained from getting through and answering ‘Sports' before requesting a live performance). Now, dear reader, it’s over. I know terrestrial won’t let me down – at least not while there’s double bills of This Life on BBC2 every night.

Hopeless Iraq

2006-11-08T22:14:00.000Z

Rachel Calton despairs as a telling documentary asks the right questions

There was not much to lighten the tone of this hour-long documentary into the new generation of Iraqi youth, many of whom have lost members of their parents’ generation to Saddam Hussein’s sadistic regime, and who are now having their dreams of freedom thwarted by an occupation that is failing to fulfil its promises of freedom and democracy.

In The Death Squads (Tuesday Channel 4, 11.05pm) a reporting crew and local journalist, who refuse to be named for the film, go outside of the green zone into the lawless Iraq that has come into being, risking the kidnapping and killing frequently carried out by criminal gangs, to document the lives of young people for whom this is their reality.

The fall of Suddam has given way to civil war, in which teenagers are too busy dodging car bombs, fearing military occupation and grieving relatives lost to the violence, to see anything but a future of trauma, and revenge.

Many, already too politicised to care about school are taking up arms, joining the Sunni insurgent cells and Shia militia. Seventy per cent of children no longer go to school; many have taken a different path since the occupation.

Of the young professionals, 40 per cent at least have fled, and those who continue to provide services do so in the constant face of danger. One doctor takes the journalist with him on a daily routine in accident and emergency, he knows of colleagues who have been called out on home visits which have turned into kidnappings. Medical supplies are almost out, and with each critical case comes a barrage of death threats ‘if you let them die I will kill you’. His fifteen minute journey home now takes two hours due to military road blocks. Many patients he treats for trauma, something he is untrained to do. So far, he continues to struggle through each day.

Teenager Kamal is trying to continue running his mobile phone business, after 13 car bombs have exploded outside of his stall. He gets nervous whenever a crowd forms, and his customers don’t hang around to browse for long. His business faces another set-back when his mobile top-up card suppliers are kidnapped for their goods.

However resilient these people are the conditions seem futile.

And as one of them points out, money and buildings can always be replaced, the brains of a country can’t.

With not even basic services available to many families, let alone education or jobs, and most living in fear in the anarchy of the militia and criminal gangs that have flourished, nobody on this documentary is thanking the military occupation they live under, however well meant it may be.

One family; husband and boys, return to a mother and wife they left to fend for herself for a year when they were all put into Abu Ghraib prison, after being accused of being an insurgent cell. Under command, they fly a white flag outside their home, but continue to live in fear of the American base they live in sight of.

The only upside to this whole documentary is the fact that while the rest of the media focuses its attentions on whether Saddam will face the noose or a bullet, following his death sentence relating to a small batch of crimes against humanity carried out 24 years ago, that pale against the huge catalogue he earned, and he refuses to remorse over, this programme at least has its attention in the right place.

Whatever happens to our hate-figure is irrelevant.

His brutal regime has been toppled, what will arise in its place is what should be occupying us now.

The collective opinion of those documented is, their lives are worse. Out of this is arising a fresh new generation of anti-western feeling.

Executing Saddam Hussein isn’t going to make a hero of anyone, and I guess that is what we should be worrying about.

Proud of Britain

2006-11-07T23:58:00.000Z

But not its TV, says Mark Lewis

The only reason to watch Trinny and Suzannah Undress (ITV, 8pm) is because Trinny sounds like tranny. And there is the hope that one day her boobs will shrink so small she’ll actually turn into a man. No luck, she’s definitely female. Only she’s not necessarily human. With her blown up lips and botoxed forehead she looks rather extra-trinnestrial.

But no less so than Britain’s favourite sudoku saleswoman, Carol Vorderman, who regrets not trying a bit harder when she was first on television back in 1984. Twenty-two years later, despite all the detox books and makeup, it all seems a bit late.

But somehow she keeps on getting work. Her latest is a plum presenting job on The Pride of Britain Awards (ITV, 9pm), or The Mirror Pride of Britain Awards as they’re properly known. All the papers do it: support a cause or event in tune with the thoughts and aspirations of their readership. The Daily Mail sponsors the Ideal Home Show because it knows its readers are the types who are jolly tired of having their wellies cluttering up their front porches. The audience in the Mirror Pride of Britain Awards look rather like Gary Linekar, Kelly Brook, Tony Blair, and Girls Aloud had infiltrated the Jeremy Kyle Show.

Truth is, many Mirror readers would be happy enough to appear on Jeremy Kyle for having slept with their sister’s husband. But The Mirror knows they would really rather appear for having rescued him from drowning first. And, as cynical as I try to be, and despite the rubbish reconstructions, it is difficult not to be moved by some of the stories.

Apart from the children who face illness with bravery, and the women who clean up sink estates with personality and massive balls, there was the man who rescued a mother and her three year old son from a burning car seconds before it exploded.

Presented with the trophy by the family he saved, he became emotional on stage. Reminded about how she showed a plump middle aged woman how to have more of an hourglass figure through clothes, Trinny was becoming emotional herself. We know this because there were tears running down her face. But since her face was otherwise static, she may have just got some botox in her eye.

Just The Music Please

2006-11-06T15:38:00.000Z

He's an oily sycophant, but Jools Holland's Later is still the best late night programme on TV, says Dennis Flower

Someone suggested I write the review for Later with Jools Holland (Friday,BBC2, 11.35) immediately after it finished while still under the influence. Good job I didn’t as I’d staggered in and heard a few bars of the final song, sitting down as the credits rolled up the screen. So this review would have consisted of swearing and a list of everyone involved in the production of the show.

Luckily for me but unfortunate for anyone having to read this drivel I’d taped it. So as soon as the throbbing in my head reduced to a dull ache the next day, it was on. Having read the other reviews on this site, I’d made my mind up to follow the tell-like-it-is style. The problem is that it’s one of my favourite programmes, and the first of the new series has again endorsed my addiction.

Yes, I realise Jools Holland comes across like an oily sycophant when he sucks up to his various guests, but these consist of brief segments in between the music. They’re a bit like Christmas, hair loss and the England football team losing on penalties in their latest competition: you know it’s coming so get over it!

The show itself has been established on a very basic premise: Five bands taking it in turn to play live yes, live! in the studio. There’s usually a guest that Holland pretends gamely to interview and he also chats briefly to some of the performers. And While the majority of people on the show are there to promote their latest release, the show is still far more enjoyable than having to listen to actors/writers/composers etc blather on about their latest stuff on vacuous chat shows.

I’ve no doubt there’s all manner of back-stage politics (the band will only appear if you get their CD in front of the camera, and don’t mention them in the same sentence as those other tossers). But Holland manages to present the show with the air of an avuncular ring master. Muse was the star band this week and set the tone by opening the show with a rendition of Starlight that would probably have proved fatal if I hadn’t let the hangover subside first.

Of course, if you have the same level of interest in contemporary music as Charles Kennedy has in soft drinks, Later is a complete non starter. But the chances are that most people will find something of interest in the line up. Muse, described in The Times’ TV guide as ‘purveyors of a grandiose,space-inspired rock’ so a rock band, basically blasted their way through three tracks at the start, middle and end of the show. Great stuff. I’d have watched it just for them.

None of Amy Winehouse, the Raconteurs, John Legend, Duke Special and the Gypsy Kings would be on my wish list but all proved enjoyable at various levels. But with a complete absence of exposed nipple-induced titillation this show is not run-of-the-mill late night viewing. There’s an almost complete absence of gyrating, scantily-clad dancers although they would prove a welcome diversion occasionally with the main focus always kept on the music. It remains one of the very few shows that I’ll watch for the full, one hour duration, even when it’s pre-recorded.

The mix of music is always diverse, and even performers that I’ve come to detest are brought down to the same level as everyone else as they’re forced to concentrate on their performance rather than posturing. I hope Jools Holland continues with this show for many years to come. Oh, and by the way, I rather enjoyed it, in case you hadn't guessed.

Kate Thornton’s Nipple

2006-10-29T14:57:00.000Z

Mark Lewis seeks cheap hits with a fleshy reminder of Kate Thornton, Ladette to Lady’s Louise Porter and Judy Finnegan.

Under normal circumstances, the only time the words ‘Kate Thornton’ and ‘nipple’ would appear together on this site would be to describe her as the hairy, stretched nipple on the vinegar tit of Saturday evening TV.
Yeahbut that was before a perky nipple apparently poked through the dress Thornton was wearing one Saturday evening a few weeks ago while hosting insipid talent-show The X-Factor. Curious browsers single-handedly, but no doubt innocently, tapped the words into Google.

The hits on Television Review went wild. Thornton, you see, had appeared in a review back in May, in which I had fantasised about using her severed head as a club to batter Match of the Day’s Mark Lawrenson. And since, on the very same page, Helen Parton had referenced the second most famous tit in the Jackson family (yes, the one hosting Janet’s nipple) disappointed X-Factor fans ended up here.

A couple of weeks later, Alastair O’Dell wrote a review of Ladette to Lady in which he innocently told readers that chief ladette, Louise Porter, had appeared in Nuts Magazine and Television Review’s hits went wild again.

Since every time I write the words, ‘Kate Thornton’s nipple’, or ‘Louise Porter and Nuts Magazine’ I improve the chances of getting some more of those lovely soft porn hits, it seems a little churlish not to give the people what they want. Especially since most of the original ‘Kate Thornton’s nipple’ and ‘Louise Porter in Nuts Magazine’ Googlers stayed around only as long as it took to hit the back button on their browsers.

So, in the spirit of cheap hits, we’ve published the frankly disappointing Kate Thorton pics, as well as one of the full set of Louise Porter shots. And just in case anybody’s wondering just what any of this has to do with television, we’ve published a picture of that most famous of TV nipple-slips: Judy Finnegan at the National Television Awards.

Do you think we might get a few hits if I mention Paris Hilton’s twat?

Dexter Special

2006-10-28T20:35:00.000+01:00

Television Review is not just global, but reputable too. Just ask Nick Yates.

It’s official, Television Review is written by “reputable influencers”. Such high praise came from Brandon, a nice press officer at American production company Showtime, who was so keen for us to take a sneak peek at upcoming crime drama Dexter that he posted a DVD of the first episode of the series - sorry, ‘season’ - all the way from the USA. The US of god damn A!

Dexter is all about the life and adventures of the eponymous police forensics expert - a police forensics expert who also happens to be a serial killer himself, Brandon told me. Airing for the first time on October 1 in the States, it will be hitting our shores sometime soon.

As promised, the preview DVD arrived through my letter box this morning, complete with shiny cardboard sleeve and press bumph, hyping up its credentials.

Turns out Dexter is rather good. Not in the class of many other US imports, but certainly better than Corrie or The Bill.

It stars the gay Fisher brother from Six Feet Under, Michael C Hall. He carries an otherwise slightly flaky cast with the same class that earned him an Emmy nomination in that last part. Playing Dexter is a case of role reversal for Hall after Six Feet Under. While he displays the same chasm-like depths of insecurity and sexual hang-ups - this time straight ones - as David Fisher, he is a brutal, murderous, cool and two-faced killer. One particularly fine episode of Six Feet Under saw David abducted and tortured. This time, he is the one holding the torturer’s tools.

The show is a version of CSI for people who can stand plot and character development. It takes place in Miami, the site of gruesome murders committed in ingenious, novel ways. The opening episode goes so far as to almost directly reference the ridiculous set ups in CSI: Miami. Everything under the bright lights of this crazy city is bizarre, so why shouldn’t its crime be bizarre, preposterous and far-fetched, the narrator asks within the first few minutes.

The premise is skilfully set up in the necessarily expositive first episode. Series’ first instalments so often do this at the expense of being any good, but Dexter had me gripped from the off. The eponymous hero, through his novel double station in life, is a hot-shot at detecting the crimes and a hot-shot at committing them without being caught. You know what they say about the police: they know how to bend the law.

See, Dexter, as we’re told in flashbacks, was brought up by his respected detective foster father, who honed him to be an ace in the ways of the law. He also spotted in him his disturbing pre-disposition for homicide and channelled this into his son becoming a vigilante. If he’s going to kill, the victims may as well be the scumbags who his incompetent police departments superiors let off the hook. He is a genuinely fascinating, multi-faceted character.

Dexter does have its faults. The heavy use of voiceover betrays the fact that it seems to have been ripped rather hastily from the source material, the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. It is flashy, and from the evidence of the first episode, it won’t be long before you’ve seen enough set ups of people appearing to be committing bloody acts in soft focus but actually just squeezing a grapefruit, flossing, shaving… the list goes on. And it is certainly nothing new. We have seen the dark, amoral comedy of a murderer with two lives screened in a similar way with the far classier adaptation of American Psycho.

Nevertheless, the preview DVD warranted the air miles. And if it’s good enough to post to humble English “reputable influencers” all the way from America, its good enough for me.

Learning Nothing Zone

2006-10-24T22:31:00.000+01:00

Richey Nash learns very little about the future, bad science and how to watch wildlife on another night in front of the idiot box

All I wanted was a glass of wine and good TV, but a quick look in the cupboards showed I was out of luck. There was no wine: just a can of lukewarm Coca Cola and cheap vodka left from a June party at a squat in Hackney. And a look in the TV guide revealed there was no good TV either.

Kicking off the night Bill Oddie’s How To Watch Wildlife (8pm, BBC2) taught me nothing about how to watch wildlife, other than ueing my own common sense. All I learned was (1) have eyes (2) find a badger/squirrel/other boring animal and (3) not crash around like a one-man band while shouting obscenities like Gordon Ramsey with less charm and more Tourette’s Syndrome. Telling the UK to be quiet while watching wildlife is the most useless celebrity-trying-to-teach show since Ian Wright’s Oi! Your Kids Are Fat and Ann Widdecombe’s Beginners’ Guide To Feltching.

But at least Oddie has a knack of making these things faintly interesting. In fact, he’s turning into the doddery eccentric TV has been missing since Patrick Moore. And at least he’s encouraging old guys in glasses to watch furry animals. Well, it’s better than having them ogle primary schools.

After Oddie failed to enthuse me about wildlife I watched The Indestructibles (8.30pm, BBC3), which tried to enthuse me about science. It did this using pointless experiments (a la Mythbusters), the first of which involved twins drinking. Scintillating.

The first twin drunk coffee while the other second drunk mineral water, to see which made them want to piss more. In the end – after five litres of liquid in two hours – it concluded that drinking five litres of coffee in two hours would make you urinate down your leg. That’s science! But it’s pointless. Even drinking five litres of bleach in two hours would make you want to go to the toilet. If you weren’t hunched triple from the excruciating internal burning.

The second experiment featured a bald guy climbing an 80’ wall in a big fridge. He wanted to see if it was easier to do it while (1) wearing warm clothes or (2) while completely naked. During the challenge the show swooshed in words like ‘nippy’ and ‘parky’ over the ‘action’, like a crap Powerpoint presentation. Eventually the guy decided it’s easier to climb a fake mountain and avoid hypothermia while wearing clothes. Genius! So don’t climb a mountain if you’re only wearing your pants. Idiot.

The idiocy got too much after nine minutes so I watched an episode of Seinfeld on DVD before tuning in to – heaven help me – The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (9pm, BBC1). An Andrew Marr cameo couldn’t make this anything more than unrealistic fluff. It’s meant to make ordinary people believe they can affect the political process, even though most can’t. I guess it’s feelgood, but showing a leading political party where the front bench is predominantly female is also ludicrous in our still penis-centric political boys’ club. Hey don’t hate me… hate the system.

So I switched to Horizon (9pm, BBC2), which tried to scare me senseless about a world in 2029 where computers will be as intelligent as human beings. They will control our thoughts. They will control our actions. Or so the show wanted to preach. This time will be ‘The Singularity’, a name that only conjures up the image of a bad Doctor Who episode.

Maybe it was the cheap vodka numbing my capacity for fear, but I didn’t find it terrifying. Partly that was because it was soundtracked by music from Harry Potter and Edward Scissorhands. And partly it was because these prediction shows rarely prove to be true. If TV in the 1970s was to be believed I’d be driving a hover car, wearing a white spacesuit, and having sex completely without emotion. And I’m only doing one of them.

But the programme did show that putting electrodes into an animal’s brain means you can control where it goes. And it also showed a monkey playing a computer game with its mind. But the show’s main aim is to scare not educate, so it’s worth treating this one with a big dollop of scepticism.

By the time hour-long Celebrity Sex Tapes Unwound (10pm, Channel 4) wheeled around, I wanted to relax. Even sex tapes of US ice skater Tonya Harding, former Hear’say bint Suzanne Shaw, and actor Rob Lowe couldn’t tempt me to keep the TV on. So I switched on the Seinfeld and tried to get comfortable with my Coke and my lukewarm vodka. Well, there's nothing wrong with turning to DVDs when TV spectacularly fails you. Again.

Look Who's gone darker

2006-10-23T17:28:00.000+01:00

David Davies finds that Torchwood hasn't spun-off quite as far as it should have

With the new Doctor Who taking off like a greyhound with a bum full of dynamite, and with the free thinking Beeb not resting on its laurels, they decided to continue the sci-fi revolution by... making a spin-off.

Torchwood follows the adventures of Captain Jack Harkness. John Barrowman (pictured), the bastard lovechild of John Travolta and Tom Cruise, is leading a crack team (does anyone actually know what that expression means?) of specialists in a fight against the alien scum of the universe. Think Men In Black. Except set in Wales. Yes, to increase what must undoubtedly be a drastically reduced FX budget (this is going out on BBC3 and BBC2 remember) the entire show is set in my homeland. This is where the problems begin.

As with Doctor Who, the show follows the classic trope of stranger in a strange land. Eve Myles plays Gwen Cooper, a police constable who ends up becoming part of the Torchwood team by seeing something she shouldn't have and - you get the idea. As with most stories that follow this thread, it's mainly for exposition purposes, and it all feels a bit tired.

There are problems with tone too. That sounds horribly Sunday Times, so let me justify myself. The show is aiming for a darker tone. People swear on a regular basis, the second episode had a full-on sex scene between two teenagers, a lesbian kiss and murder by orgasm, and there's some sexy tension between Gwen and Captain Jack. This would be great if it didn't feel like you were still watching Doctor Who. The comedy remains, the visuals are all crisp, clean and daytime, and the aliens still aren't scary enough. In a show where men are being bonked to death, these need to be pared down to a minimum. It needs to be dark and edgy, and it needs to take more advantage of its post-watershed slot when it comes to characterisation. Everyone is still Saturday night fluffy. I can't help feeling that John Barrowman is about to break into song at any moment. Eve Myles keeps the hysterics to a well-judged minimum, then gets lost in the blandness of her own character. The supporting cast are primarily there for comic relief. It's a shame because this show has great potential to really spin-off into something different and exciting.

There are moments of excellence. A three-way showdown ends with the revelation that Jack cannot be killed, a cool Captain Scarlet scenario. Barrowman does well hiding an undercurrent of melancholy beneath Captain Jack's magoo exterior, and really grabs the screen when he's given the chance during these moments, before reverting back to that Doctor Who pantomime Prince Charming that dominates the opening episodes. There's also an interesting moment in the second episode where Jack has some strange obsession with a severed hand. This is weird, freaky stuff, and it's the direction the show needs to go in. Unlike most spin-offs, there is promise here. They need to be a bit braver and row a little farther from the shore, cut loose of Doctor Who's family stylings and make something for the older teenager or even the sci-fi loving adult. It's clearly what they're shooting for, with the swearing and the blood and the sex, so why don't they go all the way, make this a real X-Files experience and satisfy those of us who wished for a little more darkness in our Doctor? Hopefully Russell T Davies will take this show where it needs to go once he knows he has our attention.

Always Believe in Your Soul

2006-10-22T20:36:00.000+01:00

Televisionreview’s very own Cheshire correspondent, Helen Parton, reports from the northwest’s televisual front line

Billing itself as Channel 4's answer to Footballers' Wives, Goldplated (Wednesday, 10pm) is hardly in the premiership of comedy dramas about the rich and useless but is rather trashily good fun all the same.

The opening scene features sweeping shots of a young girl (who we later learn is the appallingly named golddigger character Cassidy) driving up to a mock Tudor mansion in a red sports car accompanied by the opening refrain to Suede's 'Beautiful Ones'.

This is just the start of the show's literal use of song titles as some kind of plot advancement device - 'cos, like, Cassidy is a beautiful one, geddit? - which continues until the end of the episode when that cheery Flaming Lips song with the line, "Do you realise, that one day everyone you know will die' accompanies one man's untimely demise.

The other point of musical irritation is that the nightclub everyone, young or old, frequents, only seems to play Goldfrapp, much in the same way that the bar in Ally McBeal only ever played Vonda Sheppard. Still the smooth glam rock electro kind of suits the show, so we'll let it pass. For now.

They’ve got the nouveau-riche ness of this part of Cheshire spot on – every woman’s hair has been golden Labrador-ed to within an inch of its life and their bodies sprayed orange and then dipped in a tub of designer labels. Even the woman who played the frizzy permed Mum of Joe from Eastenders (you know the one that went mad and covered his room in tinfoil) has succumbed. The supporting cast is like a Stepford Wife army of Colleen McLoughlins, only not as classy. The blokes meanwhile are all shiny suits, penis extension cars and sleazy demeanors. I can’t think why I stopped living there as soon as I could.

The show does rather labour its location though, “I AM from Didsbury!” says Cassidy at one point indignantly and several other geographical reference go over even my head though one did make me chuckle. “It’s like Saudi Arabia round ‘ere’” says one older woman about half way through. I’m not sure, but the last time I checked, that particularly part of the Middle East hadn’t taken crop tops, push up bras and Bet Lynch earrings to its sartorial heart just yet.

Goldplated doesn’t yet have a superbitch character in the way Footballers’ Wives had Zoe Lucker, but Ray Winstone’s daughter Jamie - with a highly convincing Manc accent Bez’d be proud of - displays promise, what with the hot pant wearing, cocaine snorting and old man shagging. And there’s plenty of cliffhangers crowbarred into this first offering too – who is the girl in the institution visited by the shouty bloke who’s been booming, “Right lads, let’s get to work and make sooooooooome moneeeeeeeeey! like Gordon Gekko crossed with Geoffrey Boycott in all the trailers? Will we find out Cassidy is not from Didsbury at all? Will she stay with that shouty bloke when she finds out he’s about to go bankrupt? And more to the point will anyone change that bloody Goldfrapp CD?

Birth night died

2006-10-21T21:11:00.000+01:00

In her latest picture review, the outrageously talented Davina Garrido de Miguel wondered how Channel Five could cheapen something as profound as childbirth with its sordid Child Night Live

By George!

2006-10-18T18:35:00.000+01:00

Rachel Calton finds the class of an 80s icon transcends the rubbish he's forced to deal with

So the mystery behind Boy George's weird, fake burglary call basically comes down to drugs and confusion. By his own confession, in The Madness of Boy George (Tuesday, 9pm Channel 4) he was busy chatting to a photograph, which was chatting back to him, shortly before he became so paranoid that his house was being invaded and burgled, that he called up the police to get them to arrest the imaginary intruders.

All they discovered however, was the bag of coke in his bedroom (whether you believe it was one bag or 17 depends really on whether you buy George's story or the New York cops' but I'm going with the fact, that if you had stacks of the goodstuff sitting around your pad, it would take more than a delusional moment or two to personally call up the cops and invite them over for a quick rummage, paranoid or not.)

But, the bigger question here is: what was George doing at home all alone with a bag of coke in New York city in the first place? Surely we are more accustomed to him exhibiting his outlandish head gear at gigs up and down the worldwide DJing circuit, and if not that, at least at home tracking down hot young male escorts for company on the net.

This is George on a downer. A big fuckoff downer, after his west-end, semi- autobiographical hit Taboo crumbled and failed on Broadway, leaving him washed up in New York city, a crestfallen, 'has-been', too ashamed to return to England with his tail between his legs, yet with no friends in New York to help him pick up the pieces.

A gay boy without his pride.

But this is where the irony of this tragi-comedy kicks in, why did the show fall so flat on its face? Apparently because Rossie O'Donnel 'sanitised' the show to suit the American audience. Sanitise?! It's supposed to be breaking taboos. The clue Is In the name.

Boy George was the first boy to get on TV dressed up like a girl and win the hearts of a nation. Why he ever felt the need to give himself up to the Americans like that God knows, but he's pretty pissed off about it now.

The vengeance the Americans seemed to place on him, attempting to put him down for 20 years for possession of drugs, and, failing that (due to inconsistencies in evidence), parading him round the streets of Manhattan on five days community service for 'wasting police time' certainly seemed like kicking a drag when he was down.

That's apparently after nine hours being yelled at in a cell by the cops with vulgar insults. No wonder he got more-than-a-bit of a hump on when push came to shovel, and the press showed off all their most unattractive colours, and irrepressible appetite for crap gags.

Being hounded by a press you despise, who you are certain just don't 'get' you, in a city you would rather see the back of can not be a particularly charming prospect, and this documentary, that filmed George in the four weeks leading up to the sentence, showed the anxiety growing up around it.

Of course, in the end, events turned out to be worse than even BG could have anticipated, instead of the secluded park he was hoping for, he got parked right in the middle of the sanitation area to clean on one occasion, like a caged animal, while the paparazzi were served up just what they were after.

Like an animal might, surrounded by gannets, George did turn aggressive on a couple of occasions, but could only keep up the hostilities for long.

By the last day, not only was his parole officer singing his praises but so was the media circus who had spent the last week on his tail. He got into it so much, everyone ended up shaking his hand, including the reporter he earlier threatened to decapitate with his shovel.

These days the public only herald celebrities who start out from the street, and only relish the stars when they are being dragged through the gutter. But in the end, it is because Boy George is not a throw away celebrity, but a character with real wit and real gall, that he will survive the whole ordeal.

Letting anyone compromise that was what landed him in all that rubbish in the first place.

Royally Absurd

2006-10-16T18:28:00.000+01:00

David Cook will scream and scream until he’s sick if he has to watch Princess Nikki again

Myra Hindley. Eileen Wuornos. Rose West. Not the greatest women spat out by history, but they all have one redeeming feature – they’re not Princess Nikki (C4, 10pm Saturday).

Nikki – oh, you remember, she was on that thing in a house that Channel 4 spend all summer broadcasting – is quite clearly the worst female – no, sod it, worst person – that’s ever existed. You might think that sounds a bit extreme, but if there’s a worse characteristic than screaming until you get your own way, I’d like to hear about it. So having endured weeks of Nikki screaming and wailing over summer, C4 decided to give her a series in which to do exactly the same thing. In this the final tortuous week, Nikki played women’s rugby and then became an industrial cleaner.

There’s a dichotomy going on here. The point of Princess Nikki is to torture the granny-faced brat and, effectively, break her. This is good. But this means we have to watch her for a full half-hour. This is bad. Also, though Nikki may be as dim as midnight in a cave, she’s just about bright enough to realise that the point of her show is for her to wail and weep for 30 minutes, and boy, does she ever deliver on that score. This is bad. But we get to see her get the crap beaten out of her on a rugby pitch and then covered in human excrement cleaning the kind of house that would knock Kim and Aggie dead (if only). This is good. It’s so confusing.

What to do for the best? Don’t watch the show, then there won’t be another series – but ensure Nikki gets the degradation she deserves by going out and throwing her into a slurry pit. The police will understand.

He stoops to conquer

2006-10-13T17:05:00.000+01:00

With a heavy social conscience and an overactive libido, Alastair O’Dell develops a penchant for an uncouth scouser

With the ‘liberal’ west at loggerheads with a cruel, conservative Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one could hope to seek some comfort in our shared decadent beliefs by settling down to a night in front of that bastion of immorality and moron-ity ITV.

Yes, the sight of Jodie Marsh’s puppies are unappealing, and yes, Jade Goodie being a multimillionaire is soul destroying. But, God dam it, it’s the price we pay for living in a free, non-judgemental, ‘happy’ society. I can happily wallow in such depravity for the greater good.

In need of comfort, and my dinner working its way south, I switched over the goggle box to Ladette to Lady (ITV 9pm), a program advertised as helping a group of underprivileged girls get on in life. A nice, uplifting, story of social mobility in the modern age. Perfect.

Or it would be, had it not been a program solely designed to put back feminism, not to mention social equality, the proverbial 100 years. The premise of this retro-thusiast show is taking some oiks and giving them a jolly good thrashing at a finishing school in the Home Counties, in the hope that, one day they are acceptable to Victorian society.

For the task, the mean Rosemary, and League of Gentleman-esque Gill Harbord have been drawn out of retirement to bully, harass and generally put them in their place. Copious amounts of Vino-collapse-o are supplied just in case they decide to take the path less righteous and more riotous.

This week they competed for a chance to serve their social superiors at a toffee-nosed ski resort. They were of course told to keep their filthy mitts off the guests (much to the disappointment of the filthy old pervs on what they thought was an all-inclusive holiday).

The ‘inappropriate’ but nonetheless rather charming Louise Porter (Who also appears in Nuts magazine this week, lads) tragically did not make the cut to Verbier, with three portly wenches having to suffice. These girls were treated to an equally humiliating, but altogether different type of skiing experience than they are (probably) used to behind the local Dog and Duck.

All good fun, but really, why should these girls, and similar ones watching, be made to feel like scum? One cannot but sense a retro chill from Stateside here, in the post-Sex in the City, with the liberated girls-about-town ideal making way for the traditional, conservative morality of Desperate Housewives. Conservatism is on the march in this sceptre isle. Perhaps I should not be so surprised as even the most legendary heroes of all Britannia, Winston Churchill, had an American mother. Now, all that is left of Western civilisation is Channel Five.

What Not To Advise

2006-10-11T14:42:00.000+01:00

Helen Parton watches helplessly as Trinny and Susannah foist fashion on couples as if it was a marital panacea

Like much midweek viewing fodder, tonight's shows focussed on making people feel bad about themselves and then perking them up with some advice from so called 'experts' - it's enough to you want to make you never leave the house and comfort feed yourself silly, except then you'd probably have Gillian 'rapidly turning into the witch from Rentaghost' McKeith rapping at your window armed with a bag of miso slurry.

First up, Trinny and Susannah Undress (8pm, ITV), their own figures rapidly turning into a parody of themselves - Trinny's tits so nonexistent they're practically concave and Susannah rocking a Mrs Miggins (the slutty innkeeper from Blackadder) look with her prominently displayed DDs. In this series, the terrible twosome go far beyond their usual fashion tips and into much deeper territory, which they're plainly not qualified to do. Muffin tops and potbellies are one thing, dealing with breast cancer and a failing relationship is quite another and not something to be solved by a quick flit round River Island and Marks and Sparks.

"So you're marriage wasn't in great shape then?" "How has having a hysterectomy affected your sex life?" they ask poor Froso and Brian over a family get together before getting them into some new clothes that weren't that dissimilar to their old ones.

"So nice to see you in some colour!" they chorus patronisingly to Froso for wearing a top the exact same shade of green as one in which we see at the start of the show. It felt slightly unpleasant watching all this tawdry voyeurism dressed up as entertainment and so I flicked over to Cooking It (Channel 4, 8pm) with chef Jun Tanaka, a slightly mumsier version of Gok from How to Look Good Naked. This is basically Faking It for cooks so why they didn't call it Fooking It I don't know. Channel 4 you've missed a trick.

Supernanny (Channel 4, 9pm) though highly repetitive - parents have rowdy kids they can't control, Supernanny comes in sorts them out, Supernanny leaves, it all goes tits up, Supernanny returns, it's all OK again - is still a solid performer in the heartstring pulling stakes. I've noticed though that Jo Frost's not as perfect as she seems - she can't say certain words, certain words she uses quite often, correctly - unazzzeptable for unacceptable, ezzzackleee for exactly. I tell you, if she says pacific instead of specific, she's not coming near any children I know.

And neither is Jonathan King, subject of Life on the Outside (Channel 4, 10pm) or his portly Uncle-Monty-gone-bad type character of a friend, who tried to justify King’s activity with underage boys by pointing out that the homosexual age of consent had gone down from 21 to 16 during the past thirty years.

I had to turn over to the grisly goings on in a repeat of CSI New York (Five, 10pm) to feel civilized again, though I wish Five wouldn’t show episodes over again with such regularity. Maybe though they could get the wardrobe person responsible for Stella Bonasera’s stylish suits, with just the right amount of cleavage, to have a word with the infernal Trinny and Susannah. And maybe ask them some personal questions such as how much Botox have they stuck in their emotionless faces, and see how they like it.

Bush Whacked

2006-10-10T18:27:00.000+01:00

Dubya's TV death has generated controversy, but that didn't make it interesting says Richey Nash

You’ve probably already heard about Death of a President (More4, 9pm). It’s the ‘controversial’ film-length drama documentary about a fictional assassination of George Walter Bush on 19 October 2007.

Dubya has just made a speech at the Chicago Sheraton hotel. He managed to do so without (a) saying something stupid (b) starting a war or (c) choking on a pastry product. But George W. Bush is upset: in his world that makes him unproductive. Still, he’s already got wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to worry about, not to mention the new Cold War with Iran and a moose-based assault by pensioners from Canada.

Before the speech angry protestors were outside causing a ruckus: waving banners, spitting at police, and generally looking like they’d come from the first night of the Rage Against The Machine reunion tour. One of these, a young shaven headed guy called Frank Molini, broke away from the crowd and managed to get to the top of a nearby building. He had a sniper rifle so guess what happened next, kids.

Bush was outside shaking hands with the crowd and then – bang bang – he keeled over and later died in hospital. It should all feel very controversial, very dramatic, yet somehow didn't.

You see, a good drama documentary should be based on something like global warming, a believable issue that will affect everyone on the planet. That’s how to ratchet up the scaremongering. The only person who needs to be afraid about the death of George W. Bush is George W. Bush. Well, him and Republican cumjug Fox News.

So it lacked drama, and the general premise was flimsy. Okay, so someone may get onto a roof with a sniper rifle and may shoot at the President and may kill him, but it seems a little unlikely. Not impossible of course, but not probable and certainly not inevitable. And it's not scary: if anything, not having a rich Texan moron in charge of the world would be a good thing. At least until the inevitable rise of Jed Bush.

Yet this premise could have worked in an hour-long show. Death of a President, however, was a patience-stretching two hours. With long documentaries you need a Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock to push drive them on. You don’t get the same energy from random bits of ‘genuine footage’ and ‘genuine testimonies’. In fact, I had to start writing this review or I’d have fallen asleep.

The programme touched on interesting topics. The ‘assassin’ Frank Molini opened a debate about whether George W. Bush deserved to be assassinated. According to Molini, Bush has been responsible for over 100,000 deaths, is a war criminal and deserves the death penalty. It’s a debate that was quickly set down as the programme moved on to the irrelevant clues found at the fictional crime scene. Guess what programme-makers: nobody cares about the minutiae of a crime scene where a crime never happened.

It also touched on issues of Bush stealing civil liberties, then dropped it. A black guy is arrested under suspicion of being the assassin because, it seems, he is black but a dialogue about whether the US police are institutionally racist is lost. This black guy turned out to be an ex-soldier, but the argument about whether the armed forces were made to look foolish by Bush was forgotten. And when they found a guy they thought was the assassin but wasn’t, the jury sent him down because he was Syrian. Again and again, interesting points were picked up for 30 seconds then dropped.

But some bits were good. The supposed real life footage of Bush was surprisingly realistic. And the programme showed how fear whipped up by the media and government can lead to miscarriages of justice: an innocent Syrian was sent down for the assassination for looking a bit too al-Qa'eda.

Yet ultimately it was a frustrating watch. It didn’t warrant almost two hours, went into tiny pointless details too much and missed the big interesting points. It needed a firm hand to guide it but instead just ambled on to an inconsequential ending. Kind of like George W. Bush's approach to foreign policy, only with less meaningless bloodshed.

So what was the point? Frankly it’s hard to know, other than amusing people who want to see George W. Bush get shot. Sure it stimulated some controversy, just didn’t do much to stimulate brain cells.

Reach For The Sky... Remote

2006-10-10T09:39:00.000+01:00

Emma Mitchell on her love/hate relationship with Sky.

As I sit down on Sunday evening, with a glass of wine (ok, it’s actually squash) and a choice of over 400 channels, I can’t help thinking what better way to unwind before a week of work. That’s right, I am one of the privileged millions to have Sky TV.

Just how did we manage with only 5 channels, and not so long before that it was only 4 channels? I don’t think I could go back to just 5. Maybe that’s what Sky’s next advertising campaign could be about – ‘Once You Have It, You Never Go Back’. Hmm... maybe not.

Every evening, I am given so much choice I can find something to watch regardless of my mood. If I fancy a little escapism, I can watch a plethora of soaps; though I only watch EastEnders and Hollyoaks (if the other half isn’t back from work yet). I find the rest of the soaps plague the other channels. If I fancy some comedy, there are relentless repeats of Have I Got News For You and Open All Hours to keep me amused. Then if I fancy increasing my brain capacity, I can watch QI (although how anyone is supposed to know the answers is beyond me), re-runs of Who Wants Be A Millionaire, or Never Mind The Full Stops. Like any of these actually do increase my brain capacity.

Sometimes I find that there is so much choice that I cannot possibly make that choice, much to the annoyance of the other half. I’ll flick onto the TV Guide and go through so many pages of channels that I often end up just staring at a blank screen, wondering what I can eat next (another great past time of mine). Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the scary church music they insist on playing on the TV Guide screen on those rare occasions I have the TV to myself in the evenings. Why do they do it to me? It's just creepy.

In fact, there seem to be a lot of arguments and tension in the air over choosing what to watch next. I would quite happily watch a load of mindless soaps until about 7.30-8.00pm, then settle down to watch two films on a Sky Movies channel, as opposed to watching a football match and a rugby match, followed by Match of the Bloody Day.

So the more choice we have, the more we cannot decide what it is we want to watch. At least when there were only 5 channels to choose from, you had a higher chance of agreeing on the same thing. Now the odds are something like 400:1 on agreeing on a programme to watch. It’s no wonder we are an angry nation. I reckon Sky has a lot to answer for.

Didn't They Do Badly

2006-10-09T12:25:00.000+01:00

Gareth Crew avoids being stabbed and braves the TV underworld: Saturday night terrestrial TV.

Saturdays, I would presume, are the same for the majority of people in this country. If you’re not unemployed/undesirable/collecting your pension (or, if you’re Michael Douglas – all three of those things) you go about your business and leisure. You could shop, and avoid being stabbed by youths outside of Matalan, or you could be playing football in the park, and avoid being stabbed by youths. You know, you go about your business.

Then, after the ultimate disappointment of the failure for yet another week to not win the Lottery, followed by a discussion with your family/girlfriend/boyfriend/dog/cat about what you would do if you did win the Lottery (at this point, the problem of not actually buying a ticket is insignificant) you’re faced with the choice: go out, buy that 60-year, £1,987 per month mortgage for your studio flat, making anything more than tap water unobtainable, and then the ultimate decision: DVD or TV. I opt for DVD every time, and looking through the Daily Express TV guide, here’s why:

Strictly Come Dancing on BBC1. Didn’t it used to be on Sunday nights, and used to be the chance for teenage boys to stare at the slightly revealing costumes? Now, re-imagined in a Planet of the Apes Tim Burton way, you have 'celebrities' dancing. Hosted by Tess Daley and Bruce '98 years young' Forsyth, the concept is simple: lets put a load of people who are loosely associated with the Beeb in some way and make them dance like some twisted marionettes with their professionally-tanned dance partners. This one was the first in a new series, and had such competitors (notice how I don’t use the word celebrities) as Jimmy Tarbuck, dancing with a lady sporting pneumatic breasts, and Nicholas Owen (a bloke who reports the news) with another brass-coloured babe. I didn’t watch it. Apparently this is the BBC’s premier, primetime Saturday night show. Did anyone say license fee?

Over on BBC 2, you had The Culture Show. Good, but pretentious. This was followed by QI and TOTP2, then a Monty Python docu-repeat. I would write more, but no-one watches BBC 2 on a weekend, do they?

Going head to head with BBC 1’s flagship are ITV 1's these heavy-hitters. PJ and Duncan, as they were originally called, are now more important to ITV than putting right-wing messages into their evening news bulletins. A variety show of some sorts, Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway involves all the usual elements: 'comedy', competitions and guest stars. How much are they missing Paul O’Grady?

After that, X Factor. Sponsored by Nokia, I see. I don’t really understand this music-factory business; so, let’s leave it at that. What I have noticed is Simon Cowell needs to put some product into his rather dull and lifeless bog-brush type hair, and Sharon Osborne has too much. All I know is that we’ll get another rubbish Christmas No. 1, which is probably a ballad that would be sung much better by the person who wrote it.

Finally, there was A Knight’s Tale on Channel 4. I’ve got this on DVD, but didn’t fancy watching it.

So, what DVD did I pick? Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a classic, and apparently R2-D2 and C-3P0 are in one of the scenes.

Primetime Outlaws

2006-10-08T22:36:00.000+01:00

Mark Lewis watches The BBC’s Robin Hood disappoint worse than a whole weekend of daytime TV

There was a time not so long ago that timeslot was a good indicator to the quality of a programme. As surely as a rubbish national anthem signified a rubbish national football team, early Saturday evening meant must-watch TV. Admittedly that is a rule of thumb which goes back only as far as the latest incarnation of Doctor Who. But it was a good rule, and one which the Beeb was desperate to maintain.

So desperate, in fact, that they decided to take Doctor Who, send him back to 13th Century Nottingham and take away his Tardis for a 13 episode run. Like David Tennant’s Doctor Who, Jonas Armstrong’s Robin Hood (Saturday BBC1, 7.05pm) has a cheeky smile, a wicked glint in his eye and looks like he’s just got on the tube from Soho where he’s been palming off old queens for fivers.

Except Tennant doesn’t look like that. He looks like a time lord. And Doctor Who is a complex drama which explores decisions, death and repercussions. Robin Hood is a smirking; grinning; good versus evil fairytale with unnecessarily flashy stop-frame-start-frame, zoom-frame, clickclick camerawork. It’s like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in a medieval tunic. It even has the cheeky Lahndahn geezers. Not least Keith Allen, who’s irredeemably evil Sheriff of Nottingham camps his way through the show as convincingly as Bungle playing Jack the Ripper.

His is a poor homage to Alan Rickman’s brilliant big screen version. And Rickman was brilliant. Alas this programme even leaves you pining for Kevin Costner’s rubbish Robin Hood. At the end of that film Richard the Lion Heart returns after many daft years in the Middle East, during which he stupidly left his evil brother King John in charge, reminding us that the monarchy was as dense and pointless then as they are now. The worst historical revisionism from the film was Costner’s American accent. Here it is the much more egregious sight of buxom lovelies with teeth so sparkling they could be in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie - 500 years before the invention of toothpaste.

Bruckheimer insists on it. So we steel ourselves for the gleam as we turn to Five for the inevitable onslaught on the Bruckheimer-produced CSI. But nothing could steel us for the horror which confronted us instead on Five’s Birth Night: Live (Sunday, 8pm). It was not so much the live caesarean, as the spectacle of truly daytime programming for two hours at primetime. This is City Hospital with Gabby Logan and another nail in the coffin for putting the best programmes when most people are watching.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The national Anthem/national football team maxim has let us down too. On Match of the Day (BBC1, Saturday, 4.45pm) Macedonia’s barely musical anthem certainly gave us a clue as to how crappy they’d be. But England’s much more tuneful tone would have given us no idea. You’d have to listen to the words for that.

Lobotomy or creativity?

2006-10-08T13:32:00.000+01:00

In her latest picture post Davina Garrido de Miguel takes her scalpel to Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive

It was brave of Stephen Fry to allow the nation to witness his depression and honest of him to admit he would rather keep the illness than bosh the pills. But surely if you are in real mental torture you would do anything to stop the pain.The really worrying part of the programme was the mother of two adolescent boys who in an almost pre-emptive strike decided to give her children an obscene amount of medication just in case they developed any more symptoms. She was a scary control freak and her kids looked lobotomised (they are depicted as two pill heads in my drawing).Fry doesn't have to justify his behaviour as he is well loved and talented and let's face it clowns are generally sad.

Weekend TV

2006-10-06T14:39:00.000+01:00

David Davies lines up the pick of this weekend's terrestrial couch fodder.

Saturday night is a veritable feast of high and low-brow entertainment. Auntie's paying big respect to two ancient legends, Robin Hood (BB1, 7.05pm) and Bruce Forsyth. The former lands a coveted primetime slot in an eponymously title drama series. It stars Keith Allen as the Sheriff of Nottingham, so it could go either way. A bit like Brucie's jokes, which will undoubtedly punctuate the majority of awful dance routines in Strictly Come Dancing (BB1, 7.50pm). There are only three good couples per series, so it'll be some weeks yet until we see proper fireworks, which, coincidentally, will tie in nicely with bonfire night.

If primetime razmatazz isn't your thing, turn over to The Culture Show (BBC2, 7.40pm). It's a 50-minute tribute to the nicest man in the world, Michael Palin. He'll be talking about his newly-published diaries, as well as picking his favourite moments from Python. The clips alone make this a worthy watch.

If they get round to showing any scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you'll probably be in the mood for A Knight's Tale (C4, 9.30pm). Perfect family entertainment, with a winning performance from Paul Bettany. It won't change your life, but it will make it a bit happier.

Steer clear of this week's Parkinson (ITV, 10.35pm) featuring the dire line-up of Shane Richie, Sheila Hancock and Jeremy Paxman, with music from Corinne Bailey Rae. Is this the Des O'Connor Show or something, Parky? You had Blair on a couple of months back, I swear you did, and now you have Shane Richie topping the bill? It's frustratingly inconsistent TV.

Unfortunately, Parky seems to trigger a slump in the schedules, as the best Sunday night has to offer is Dragons' Den: Where Are They Now? (BBC2, 8.00pm). This takes an hour-long look at whether any of the burgeoning entrepreneurs who picked up some of that tasty cash from the Dragons' tables have been successful. Investments include the Yaki Box Japanese cooking system and the high-tech pooper scooper. Should be good, but it's doubtful whether it can top the original premise.

Alternatively, stick with the ever-reliable Sunday night nature programme, always a safe bet, featuring Steve 'I'm bland, me' Leonard. Still, Incredible Animal Journeys: In the Footsteps of the Ice Bear (BBC1, 8.00pm) follows Aurora, a 23-year old mother polar bear and her tiny cub across the Arctic. With a one-line synopsis like that, it's as close as you can get to a safe bet.

Podcast

2006-10-04T21:56:00.000+01:00

Download TV Review's first podcast - it's free!

In the first TV Review Podcast, Mark Lewis chats with Ben Watkins about Ross Kemp's potato-shaped head, Westwood's 'rough wheels' and the Top 10 celebrity deaths. Oh, and three mentions of Space 1999. This one goes up to 11, so download it and enjoy.

Format: MP3
File size: 4.6MB

Download

David Who?

2006-10-02T12:43:00.000+01:00

Almost reduced to Tennant’s by Tennant, Helen Parton is then revulsed by Burrell and finds the kids are alright

There’s quite a few things to discombobulate the viewer about David ‘Doctor Who’ Tennant’s appearance on Wednesday’s Who Do You Think You Are? (9pm, BBC1). Not least the fact that he has a hell of a Scottish accent in real life, albeit quite a middle class one. He is also sporting a big straggly beard (which he has yet to dye a comedy crimson shade like professional Caledonian Billy Connelly. Thank God). Thirdly, there’s no Billie Piper hanging around parroting ‘ohmygodinnit there’s a Cyberman/Dalek abahhhhht to do us in doctor innit’ and the programme is all the duller for it. In fact, it’s quite dull all told.

Even one of the lovely historians he meets on his travels to uncover his ancestry enquires as to whereabouts of his Tardis as they hike across the Isle of Mull to see where his relatives once toiled on the bleak Highland landscape. This programme has all the good intentions of someone who’s just come back from holiday, but looking at someone’s else’s holiday snaps is as boring as following somebody else’s family tree. Sorry David, you seem like a nice fellow too, and extra cool points for taking your surname from Neil Tennant after flicking through Smash Hits.

Ian Wright’s Unfit Kids (9pm, Channel 4) reached a fairly satisfactory denouement – all the little chubsters look slightly less Weeble like, even the one who had four (FOUR!) TVs in his bedroom, the parents were all grateful and Wrighty declares all his efforts to be duly werrrf it.

One wonders if there are going to be enough troubled teenagers to sustain this kind of programming - there seemed to be dozens of them in Ballet Changed My Life: Ballet Hoo! (10pm, Channel 4) Nearly all seem to have quite harrowing domestic stories, prised out of them by a mix of gung ho Oprah style Yanks and namby pamby Guardian reading patronising Brits that made up their yoof workers. My early favourite is the Lemar lookalike kid who is to play Tibault in their version of Romeo and Juliet.

Forget Montagues and Capulets, Paul Burrell versus just about everyone on Trust Me I’m a Holiday Rep (11pm, Five) provoked just as much spleen venting hatred. “She’s just a housewife. From the north,” minced Burrell about pseudo boss Julie, before laying into his fellow contestants including Roland Rivron “I thought it was someone related Roland Rat!” Noel from Hear’say and the splendidly good time chap Brandon Block who I might now just have a bit of a crush on. But what was Lucy Rusedski doing presenting this low rent Love Island? Surely Greg’s not that shit at tennis? And doesn’t she look like Nookie Bear with a wig and massive dimples chiselled in? – go on, Google Nookie Bear and you’ll see.

But crap syrup of the week has to go to Andrew Neil on the Labour Party Conference (11:30 am, BBC2) - it was a slow day on the freelance front, OK! Since the Thick Of It, all this political posturing seems a massive parody of itself. The best thing Gordon Brown could do is sign up Peter Capaldi before Dave Cameron gets there first.

Artistic Impressions

2006-09-28T21:49:00.000+01:00

Davina Garrido de Miguel, the artist whose work at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, was the subject of a recent BBC documentary, has turned her brilliant artistic hand to television reviews.

Brett's dead baby Brett's dead

I loved Bodyshock: Kill Me to Cure Me. (Monday, Channel 49pm). The glee with which the doctors talked about how they ressurrected their dead patients was fascinating, and Dr Robert Spetzler had these large expressive hands that came out at you like Nosferatu. Of course this was supposed to be quite a serious programme about medical breakthroughs but the Hammer Horror element intrigued me and what exactly happens to your soul when it is clinically dead. The Nowegian woman who had been dead for six hours seemed pissed off with the whole ordeal and looked like she'd entered Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' . Poor American Brett Kehrer definitely deserved an encounter with 'the white light' but didn't get one . I have depicted him in my sketch as dead and also with his soul in the hands of Dr Spetzer. He sees a cartoon angel that beckons him to the light but it's just an operating lamp.

Hey Sama any chance of another 9/11 I gotta democratizationalise THE WORLD!

I was watching Film 2006 with Jonathon Ross (Monday, BBC2, 8pm). His review of Oliver Stones latest 'action' movie, World Trade Center, with Nicholas Cage seemed pretty tame considering the trailer for the film starts with 'this is a simple story of two men's struggle for survival'

THE HORROR. I won't be seeing this film and unless you are brain dead I don't imagine you will either. Why does the media think we need constant reminding about 9/11. It's indelibly etched on everyone's brain. HOW CAN WE FORGET? I am not interested in the path to 9/11 or the minute details of what happened on stairwell B, and think the media should be scrutinising what's been happening since 9/11 and why such an horrific event has been the breeding ground for even more atrocities and the death of many more thousands of people in the intervening years. It serves the cretinous Bush and his allies well to keep 9/11 fresh in our minds because he can therefore carry on using it as an excuse to 'democratisationalize' the world for ever more and get a little oil on the way. AMEN

2006-09-28T10:49:00.000+01:00

Breakdowns, Drugs and Courtney Love

Rock’s bad girl is a mess, but not so much that she can’t project an image says Television Review’s own metaller, Miss Ego Odman

She’s known as Kurt Cobain’s widow, as singer of defunct girl-band Hole, and as a perpetual mess. In The Return of Courtney Love (More 4, 9pm) follows a Love who is fresh from rehab as she records new album ‘How Dirty Girls Get Clean.’ The programme’s real aim is not to showcase her music, but to separate the woman from the myth. The viewer never sees the presenter in full, which allows the specially selected clips of Love to do the talking.

Before any tracks can be laid down in the studio, the singer must go through her morning rituals, which involve yoga and Buddhist chanting – pretty standard for Hollywood. In a more candid touch we learn that she chants daily for Cobain, Lindsay Lohan (!) and even more bizarrely, all the horses, dogs and cats of the world (not least her own cat, Fluffy).

Such benevolence is rarely expected from one of the most hated women in rock, but such craziness comes as standard. Besides the fact Love lost her fortune, much is made of her recent mental breakdown, which culminated in her taking heroin for the first time in nine years. She hoped to die, but was treated in hospital and referred back to court for her third drugs possession trial. She is regretful but unapologetic, laughing “if I wasn’t a bit mad I’d be a worthless rock star!”

The documentary makers portray her as a woman who’s firmly back on the wagon, but who could slip off at any moment. She admits to being tempted by coke at a friend’s house, is told off by 13-year-old daughter Frances Bean for smoking during their shopping trip, and slumps on the floor during a late recording session after receiving an unpleasant email. Her behaviour in this last episode is unconvincing. Love is acutely aware that the crew is filming, having already asked them to stay, and she appears to deliberately adopt the pose of someone still on drugs.

Other moments also seem designed to attract attention. In one scene, Courtney takes the crew into her garage and reveals rails and rails of her and Kurt’s old clothes. She picks up a fleece-lined cord jacket, and explains matter-of-factly that Kurt was wearing it when he killed himself. She says that she’s never told anyone before in case people try to steal it, and goes on to describe it as ‘creepy’. So why tell a film crew now? Why sensationalise his death further? She never offers an answer.

The only clues to the real Love lie in her body language, which would be difficult to sustain artificially. In nearly all of the footage she has a cigarette dangling limply from her mouth and rocks backwards and forwards on the spot.

Despite her shortcomings, all stars featured in the documentary have great affection and respect for the original bitch of grunge. Musician and ex-lover Billy Corgan seems resigned to Love’s flighty ways, and tells of a gig in Philadelphia when he spotted his girlfriend out of the corner of his eye – showing her knickers to another man. Meanwhile actress Carrie Fisher acts as a mentor and confidante, advising Love on property and relationships.

The music takes second place to personal revelations in this documentary, and clips are only used to give weight to her confessions. However, the snippets from the recording sessions are compelling. At one point, Love sings onstage with a guitar, her face mimicking Kurt’s in the famous MTV ‘Unplugged’ session. Moreover, her vocals have a Kurt-esque rasp to them, along with a touch of country and her trademark bitch-power.

Producer Linda Perry (Pink, Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera) says Love is ‘very talented’, and worries about living up to her professional responsibilities, while Corgan calls her a 'vastly underrated song writer'. Whether the album will be a success is hard to determine, but what is obvious is that the documentary makers – and the public – see Love first and foremost as a creator of personality, rather than of music.

2006-09-26T18:28:00.000+01:00

Richard Hammond can rest easy

Watching the new series of Fifth Gear makes Gareth Crew want to freeze his blood and drill holes in his head

Al Gore! They’ve got Al Gore. Almost exciting: And that is not a phrase you usually hear about Channel Five-made programs. I almost couldn’t wait.

Earlier this year, I became the voice of the nation by stating that Five's Fifth Gear was far superior to that CeBeebies show on BBC2 on a Sunday night, so I was entrusted, in a non-biased way to review the new series (Monday, Five, 8pm)

Roll VT. Or something. Firstly, they’ve moved from their rather poor offices to the Ace Café. I’m not liking this. Next, it was Vikki-Posh Totty with some bloke called Tim Lovejoy (pictured)presenting.

There’s something mildly amusing about a bloke called Lovejoy presenting a programme about cars – I almost thought that he was going to add a mullet to his leather jacket and sell a dodgy motor. Which needn't be a bad thing, unless he then professes to know nothing about cars and thinks he’s Simon Amstell.

They even Top Gear tested some cars with Tiff ‘I want to be the Stig’ Nedell. And the only good thing about the race with a plane was that it was at Lydden Hill in Dover. I’ve been there. Excellent bacon butties.

But there was still the highlight: an interview with Al Gore no less. Okay so he was never actually US President but he's made rather a natty film about the environment and, admit it, he's still a big shot. And yet somehow Five managed to make the interview more disappointing than satsumas for Christmas.

When you have someone talking about the environment and wanting to do away with the internal combustion engine, you’d think there would be a good debate and some answers. There was nothing of any substance and Lovejoy did a post interview chat with Posh Totty that was right out of the quasi-rubbish PopWorld Mickey take. Come on! The chap was talking about the environment!

A few more races of insignificance and irrelevant features and, without any trace of hyperbole, it was definitely the most disappointing first episode of anything. Ever. Worse than The Phantom Menace.

Fifth Gear used to be a refreshing, technical change to Top Gear. Now it’s a poor copy without the wit. And that’s saying something.

Next up, on Channel 4 (9pm) was Bodyshock: Kill Me To Cure Me, focusing on the tragic situation that befell 27-year old Brett Kelver. Brett started to suffer from headaches. Thinking nothing of it, he went to the doctors. After an MRI scan he was diagnosed with an aneurysm that was so severe he could die at any time.

There appeared to be no way for him to survive, until, ironically a surgeon wanted to flatline him to work on his head – kill him for an hour by freezing him then deal with the aneurysm then wake him up. This was his story and the story of this technique.

After the obvious tearful farewells (they were all religious people – but never once did this film explore the moral dilemma of practically poking god in the eye and running away) the program started going on about how this technique started. It was not really that shocking and padding for the main part of the program - not least the testimony of a former surgery survivor/nutter who banged on for a while about an out of body experience.

Even so, this was mostly first class documentary story telling of a first class documentary story. The surgeon, with a hint of Robert Lindsay about, him ran through the risks to Brett and his family. Hilariously, he mentioned that one of the risks of the procedure would be death (notwithstanding the bit where he actually kills him for a while). We see the technique; a massive barbiturates session followed by a macabre replacing of standard 37 degree blood with an ice-chilled replacement. (Think getting off your head in Glasgow, and then getting beaten up). Then they killed him and worked on his head. “It’s not death,” said the surgeon, “As the state is reversible.”

And it was. After being dead for 17mins, he woke up. He made a full recovery. Incredible. Science is cool, and no one does a documentary better than Channel 4 (well, perhaps BBC2).

2006-09-21T22:55:00.000+01:00

Selling out?

Myths busted, dreams shattered, expectations undermined: just a normal night on Richey Nash's sofa.

Do you believe you can survive for days after being buried alive? How about that commonly held conviction that you can fool a breathalyser test by putting an AA battery under your tongue? Or that it’s impossible to explode a cannon made of a tree trunk? Did you say ‘Yes’ to all three? Well in that case you’d have found your world rocked to its mantle by two American geeks with glasses and ginger goatees in Mythbusters (BBC2, 7.30pm). They proved them all wrong. Shocking!

Now, lets get to an obvious flaw: the only people who have any faith in these so-called common beliefs are idiots. If you think you can survive for three days after being buried alive, then you deserve to be buried alive for three days. Most people would rather mash up their own knees.

The other two premises were equally ludicrous, almost like they were chosen as the pretence of doing stuff that teenage boys love: men doing stupid things, exploding stuff, and getting drunk. And once you accept that, it’s actually good brain-dead fun. Hooray! There was also a lightly spread layer of science, and a decent soundtrack featuring snippets of The Hives, Kings of Leon, and The White Stripes.

Then onto the serious pantomime of Dragons’ Den (BBC2, 8pm), the final episode in the series, featuring deluded wannabe entrepreneurs pushing wacky product ideas like garish pullable suitcases that children can sit on, and small advertising zeppelins. It’s great watching the five Dragons pick holes in these big business pretensions, smash dreams on the cold wooden floor.

But equally good is that at the end there’s always someone who wins the Dragons over or, in this case, two people, the inventors of a wireless machine that can monitor how much people are spending on casino machines, how long they spend there, and other interesting features. Truth be told, it made me yawn a little, but the Dragons saw pound signs and all wanted a piece of the action.

The entrepreneurial pair wanted £200,000 for 15% of their fledgling company. Duncan Bannatyne offered £200,000 for 50% but got rebuffed, before Theo Paphitis came in with a bid of £200,000 for 25%. There’s no way to make this interesting – well, unless you put it on TV – but stick with it. Theo Paphitis’ deal drove Bannatyne, Peter Jones and Richard Farley out of the bidding. But in a final twist, Deborah Meaden offered to split the deal with Paphitis. Everyone agreed and the inventors went away satisfied. What a happy ending.

Or rather it wasn’t the end, for next week they bring back idiots who got kicked out of the Den before, to see if they made a success of their ludicrous ideas. But I’m more interested in where the Den is and what it’s usually used for. Guy Ritchie films? Reservoir Dogs ear scene recreationists? Or by Sir Alan Sugar’s heavies to, err, ‘soften up’ Syed for leading his apprentice astray?

But these questions fell by the wayside as I caught the ‘difficult’ second episode in the ‘difficult’ second series of Ricky Gervais comedy Extras (BBC2, 9pm). After starting with a scene from Andy Millman’s appalling sitcom When The Whistle Blows, it seems Gervais is trying to mould himself as the British Larry David. An awkward moment where he has to give £20 to a homeless guy is second-rate Curb Your Enthusiasm, as is the time he gets friend Maggie to ask for his autograph to impress another woman. It looks to be gearing up to something good.

And then it falls flat as Gervais tries to do too much: mocking fame-obsessed members of the public, lampooning desperate celebrities who crave everyone’s love, and so on. In musical terms it’s like the directionless second album of the artist who tries to show everyone how tough it is being a star, while forgetting what it is that made them a star in the first place. Funny moments are what made Gervais famous, but now he’s famous he doesn’t want to play that game any more. Which means Extras is now a comedy without many funny moments.

Some of it reads like rehashed stand-up jokes like, when talking about Celebrity Love Island, Millman/Gervais says, “Why would I want to be on a programme that, when I watched it, I prayed for a tsunami?” It’s a quite funny stand-up one-liner, but out of place in the sitcom.

And then David Bowie comes on the scene, and makes up a song about Andy Millman being fat, talentless, and why he should commit suicide. It’s not funny, just uncomfortable.

The show seems to be saying Gervais doesn’t want to make lowest common denominator comedy that appeals to everyone. That’s fine, admirable even: there are ways to make people laugh other than resorting to dick jokes and tired catchphrases. This isn’t Little Britain.

But Extras doesn’t offer an alternative to the lowest common denominator comedy Gervais is railing against. The show doesn’t have jokes. Maybe that’s Gervais’ intention, but there’s no shame in writing a comedy that makes people laugh. And just because you make people laugh, that doesn't always mean you've sold out or compromised your principles. Even so, Extras is still an interesting watch. Not laugh-a-minute, but certainly compelling.

2006-09-19T13:05:00.000+01:00

The next big hit?

Big Bri Yates scans the schedules for America's latest Sopranos-style hit but finds Entourage is just following the real TV stars

Most of what passes for drama on our television screens is either puerile drivel, pretentious twaddle or costumed period prattle for people who ‘don’t have the time’ to read classic fiction.

But every so often a drama series comes along that leaves the movies for dead when it comes to psychological depth, complex plotting and character development.

In the eighties and early nineties these gems were made in Britain. The Jewel in the Crown; Tutti Frutti (now revived as a stage play... in Aberdeen); Our Friends in the North: these could claim to be the great literature of their time, redefining the possibilities of screen drama.

More recently we have looked to America for our seriously good viewing. Those of us who believe that popular entertainment can also be art spend our lives waiting for the next big thing, hoping to be in from the start, helping to spread the gospel or simply wallowing in our own exquisite taste and judgement – but these shows have a tendency to slip in through the back door on obscure satellite channels and can too easily pass us by.

I have smugly followed the peerless Sopranos from episode one but I’ve only just caught up with the opening weeks of Six Feet Under on DVD and I fear that the much-lauded West Wing passed me by.

Thus I have forced myself to stay up late, drop everything and tune in to HBO’s latest, Entourage (ITV2, Sunday, 10.00) Will this be tomorrow’s classic, or is it simply an opportunity for a range of trendy young men to drive around in a range of expensive vehicles with a range of beautiful and scantily-clad young women, spouting witty dialogue, most of it centred on the word ‘fuck?’

Last week’s two opening episodes introduced smash-hit actor Vince, his fawning entourage and their glittering decadent lifestyle. It left me wondering whether I’m supposed to like any of the characters, but I’ve spent eight years pondering the same question with Tony Soprano’s crew, so I guess this might be sophisticated characterisation.

Having just hugely enjoyed the shiny Bacardi advert that was Miami Vice (the movie) I tried not to feel guilty at being gripped by the glossy rush of Entourage, telling myself that this is obviously satire! Episode three started brightly, with shots of the boys neatly patched into footage of a boxing title fight.

Later the boys misbehaved at a swanky golf club, Eric – the sensible one – had break-up sex with his ex girlfriend, the boys... misbehaved on a TV talk show, and that was about it. I didn’t much care what happened to any of the characters and the ‘satire’ hinges on the stunning revelation that world of Hollywood is a trifle on the shallow side! Entourage is an easy way to spend 40 minutes when you come in from the pub, but I don’t think we’ll be buying the box set.

2006-09-17T12:11:00.000+01:00

Back of the Net

Thursday nights see a comedy diamond mine for adolescent quoters as BBC2 starts to repair some of the damage it did with Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, says Lucien Mettomo

Rejoice! The hour between 9 and 10 has been occupied with comedy gold. It’s good to see that Thursday night has been wrestled back from those individuals who over the last few years have forced us to take a good look in the mirror in an effort to release us from our ignorant bliss. Gone are the accessible TV scientists and historians of this world who say things like ‘in conclusion’ and tell us that babies are actually really clever and that modern mankind descends from some weird algae which has been growing for a thousand billion years off the coast of Vuanatu.

To the ignorant masses Thursday night has been returned to its rightful place as a comedic solitude from the crushing modern world. It harks back to a time when schoolyards were places where incessant quotes from Papa Lazaru and Alan Partridge occupied most, if not all, conversation between adolescent boys. Well may I just say ‘Jurassic Park’ because its time has returned.

The Thursday night power hour kicked off with the new series of Extras (BBC2, 9pm). Ricky Gervais’s Andy begins filming for his new sitcom. He is fighting against the tide of formalism and inane scripts which his BBC bosses have put upon him. Oh how very post-modern of BBC2 to take the piss out of its own former sitcoms. Well it isn’t enough BBC2. Two pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps has occupied far too much of the schedule for me to forgive you that easily.
Anyway, whilst Andy is busy making his sitcom, Maggy is spurning the advances of a narcissistic Orlando Bloom. It was comedy, which only Ricky Gervais can do: understated Genius. And on top of this it guest starred the dream comic duo of a bigoted Keith Chegwin and Barry from Eastenders.

After that I had the pleasure of sitting through the first episode of That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC2, p.30pm). Or as they are more well known, Those Two from Peepshow. I started as a sceptical spectator. I couldn’t shake the image of the hapless duo of Mark and Jeremy, struggling through the rigours of every day life, while endlessly failing to shake their crippling neuroses. Too many nights spent watching DVDs of Peepshow for hours on end has meant that the comedy sketch show was too much a leap of imagination. But they won me over with their outrageous sketches – my favourite being ‘Number Wang’, the impossibly complicated mathematics gameshow which can only be explained as a parody of all those gameshows which look easy but are in fact incredibly hard to understand, like Deal or No Deal.

In conclusion, take that Simon Schama!

2006-09-13T23:40:00.000+01:00

Ian Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

Is Ian Wright on TV again? Mark Lewis investigates what's going on

In Ian Wright’s Unfit Kids (Wednesday, Channel 4, 9pm) Ian Wright continues the genre of mystery in which the footballer-cum-tv presenter has so far excelled. The subtlety of mystery is not what you would immediately associate with ‘Wrighty’ but the conundrum of why he keeps on getting work is one for Miss Marple…

Okay, so I wrote that paragraph before I had even watched the programme but Marple would not be disappointed. Exhibit 1: boundless enthusiasm for stating the fucking obvious. (‘Kids these days is really fat man’).

Exhibit 2: A messianic complex, which makes Michael Jackson look like Rab C Nesbit. ‘I don’t know anything now what is more important than what I’m doing,’ says Wrighty, conveniently forgetting about brain surgeons, diplomats and people what work in launderettes. (Oh yeah and whatever it is Jamie Oliver does these days, upon whose programmes this derivative dirge seeks to trade.)

Cue Wrighty looking seriously concerned Jamie-style about these kids who are probably going to die of being fat, lazy, and their parents’ children long before this three part fart of a TV programme sees its blubbery conclusion. Captain Wrighty's got only three weeks to save these children's lives with exercise and stuff or something I think.

Channel 4 isn’t even trying, which you can no longer say about Channel 5. Its hour of comedy starts with Swingers (10pm) then Respectable (10.30pm) and ends up being a near complete waste of sixty minutes. But at least Five has started making its own programmes for primetime, and while Swingers is just a bog standard sketch show, Respectable’s attempt at a sweet sitcom set in a brothel is at least original. Unfortunately its shit. And you wouldn’t need Marple to work that out.

2006-09-12T22:30:00.000+01:00

And another thing...

Richey Nash sees the irony in Anne Widdecombe's diatribe against vanity

Tuesdays are the new Wednesdays. On the plus side it means you reach the midpoint of the working week a day earlier, but on the minus side it means Tuesdays now have no good programmes. Even watching Supernanny Jo Frost discipline the feral spawn of idiot parents has lost its thrill.

So it’s official, Tuesdays are now crap. Don’t believe me? Well, a 45-minute rant by Anne Widdecombe about society’s preoccupation with image in Don’t Get Me Started! (Channel 5, 7.15pm) was ranked among the top tips in TV guides. If that’s not a sign that something’s wrong, I don’t know what is. Even the irony of watching Widders rail against vanity while sporting a blonde dye job – a reflection of her own vanity – stopped being amusing pretty quickly.

The problem was that like its subject matter the show was style over substance, but without much style. It definitely wasn't exciting or controversial enough to warrant an exclamation mark in the title. And it didn’t say much that was particularly interesting, so viewers came away no clearer on issues like whether women’s magazines reflect a female preoccupation with diets or the mags create it.

Then the show said make-up is becoming more popular among men because there are more magazines peddling images of Adonis metrosexuals to males. Why? Because male make-up is a growing market and companies want to tap into it by using their advertising money to fund magazines that push images of ‘perfect’ males. The effect? Men become more obsessed with make-up. Pretty simple stuff.

It would’ve been more interesting to hear Widders go into greater detail about the MPs she knows who use make-up at the dispatch box. As it is we’ll have to speculate. Blair? Obviously. Cameron? Oh yes. Prescott? Well I thought he had a red face cos he’s a bit porky, but it might be covered in rouge.

Then Widders went to a gym and talked to some meathead who says all men are striving for the perfect body. Sad to tell you this Mr No-Neck, but I’m not. I adore my pasty 12-year-old torso and limp girly arms. An Adonis complex is too much effort. Having said that I did go to the gym a few times to get a six-pack. I did too many back exercises and got a backpack. Fnar.

Then it went to a break that included an ad for the programme after, a new series called, err, Diet Doctors: Top To Toe (Channel 5, 8pm) that promised to tell people how to, err, lose weight. Who says Channel 5 doesn’t do irony?

Widders came back after the break to reveal that the preoccupation with vanity is in some way related to society’s lack of religious belief. And that people would rather go to a spa than go church. But even if Widders wanted to say spas are bad, her point was undermined because she interviewed the spa owner while getting a hand massage. And she did it while wearing a dressing gown with a disturbing crack so you could look right up her left thigh. Nasty. Luckily, it was before teatime so I hadn’t eaten.

Then the show veered onto another subject: plastic surgery, including an ‘admission’ by beauty journalist Bonnie Estridge that she’s had botox. Really dear? As if your stretched clingfilm face didn’t give it away. Actually I can’t criticise because I’ve had surgery: I had my whole body amputated so now I technically weigh nothing. Fnar.

People made arguments both for and against surgery without reaching conclusions, and then there were vox pops that asked members of the public what they’d have done. Personally I’m holding out for a penis transplant, because there’s only so excited a woman can get about being penetrated by my cocktail sausage. I say cocktail sausage, I mean cocktail stick. But at least a toothpick penis means I can play a role in a woman’s dental regime when I’m getting a blowjob. Fnar. Oh.

“You can even get a designer vagina,” says Widders. Yes Anne, but there are limits. You shouldn’t, for example, have one in the middle of your face.

In the end they did a bit where she stood on a London street looking disapproving, while wearing a black coat. Scowl-faced with brow furrowed, the programme drifted off and you sense that Widders is still there looking pissed off. With little of interest to say the programme really didn’t warrant 45 minutes: the content could have fitted easily into ten minutes while the style made it seem nearer two hours.

And then? Well I tried watching a family of idiots investing £1.29m in a hotel, despite having no hotel experience, in Risking It All (Channel 4, 8pm) but it was all very predictable: they started badly, got in some guru to give them advice, and ended up good. End of story.

And finally I put on unwieldily titled Zoe Lucker and Sarah Barrand’s Date with The Dalai (ITV2, 9pm), which featured the two actresses – the latter I’ve never heard of – travelling around India trying to have religious experiences. They did so with various degrees of success, and never even met the Dalai Lama. Well, maybe next week.

But I quickly lost interest. You see, I was too busy preening myself and flexing (both of) my muscles at myself in the mirror. Widders would be sooo disappointed.

2006-09-08T12:43:00.000+01:00

Da best thing on TV

Gangsters are just too cool for The Sopranos not to be good, says Nick Yates

What, you say? Tony Soprano frickin’ shot and fighting for his life as the credits roll? What’s with Vito’s dramatic weight loss, and will the muscle side of the family still be the Stuggots after Gene’s dramatic suicide? The first episode of the sixth and - so we’re told - final series of The Sopranos last week remained as daring and delightful as ever. Could the cliffhanger-following second episode maintain the pace (Thursday, E4, 10pm)?

Well, in short, no. This one had a dreamy quality as Tony drifted in and out of consciousness in an expensive hospital bed. Nevertheless, the sense of emotion is powerful, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s by far and away the best thing on TV.

The papers have been full since this time last week of comment pieces on the demise of British drama, relative to the powerhouse US network HBO. It’s hard to believe we once came out with Our Friends in the North and Cracker.

This is made even more embarrassing by what our fat friends across the Atlantic Ocean have been churning out - not only The Sopranos, but 24, The Shield, Six Feet Under, House, Deadwood, the list goes on.

Even Ricky Gervais has come out and hinted he will defect after the soon-to-hit-our-airwaves second series of Extras and make a dark and weighty drama for HBO.

The newspaper columnists guessed at lots of reasons for this parlous state of affairs. Where as in America, TV is dominated by directors like The Sopranos’ David Chase and Six Feet’s Alan Ball, here the penny counting producers are in charge. Or maybe there simply isn’t the creative talent behind our goggle box output that there was 5, 10 or 15 years ago.

However, they all seem to be missing one stark fact that makes The Sopranos so great. Gangsters are cool. It’s simple in this humble reviewer’s opinion. Give the camera to someone capable of operating it, the typewriter to someone willing to cover provocative subject matter and deep characters, and don’t use actors from Hollyoaks, The Bill or Casualty. Throw in a smattering of music that hasn’t stopped to tell the charts the time of day in the past 15 years, multiply all that by “gangster”, and you can’t fail.

One aspect of TV produced within our shores that provides a shaft of sunshine is comedy. Time Trumpet (BBC2, 10pm) is one such show fighting the good fight. This direct descendent from The Day Today drew my attention in the ad breaks between E4’s finest.

This week, the subject of the spoof talking heads documentary on futuristic current affairs is racism. Laught at the BNP. So wrong, yet so right. Brilliant.

2006-09-06T22:10:00.000+01:00

Trial by TV

Richey Nash gets wound up as two programmes show him two more ways in which he's deficient

I hate my TV: it keeps bringing judgemental know-it-all into my house. Antipodean android Nikki Hambleton-Jones on Ten Years Younger telling me I need surgery or I’ll end up looking like Michael Winner’s ballbag. Stuck up IT girl wannabes Trinny and Susannah on What Not To Wear telling me I should ditch my paisley pattern blouse because it’s unflattering. And Jo Frost on Supernanny telling me it’s child abuse to beat my kids around with a saucepan full of boiling water.

TV keeps bringing people into my living room who tell me I’m ugly, I’m unfashionable, I’m stupid: I wouldn’t mind, but they’ve never even met me. And last night saw the return of two such shows, How Clean Is Your House? and You Are What You Eat.

How Clean Is Your House? (Channel 4, 8pm) included melodramatic intro music and pantomime camp. The Northern voiceover jockey tried his best to over-egg the ‘action’ while Napoleon-sized Aggie MacKenzie did the science. But the show’s star is big-armed panto dame Kim Woodburn.

“I’m shocked,” she proclaimed when she discovered the house was dirty, as if nobody had explained the premise of the show. Let’s hope she finds out it’s a cleaning programme by the end of the eleven-episode series: if not she’ll probably keel over.

But even if Rugburn understood the premise of the show, she shouldn’t be surprised that the house was dirty. The owners – a couple – left the big smoke ten years ago to start a farm in their back garden and now own over 300 chickens. It was like The Good Life, if Tom and Barbara were replaced with Barbour-wearing tramps. One of them had a straggly beard, but the beard was too long for me to work out which.

“They’re dirty but they’re happy with it. There’s a moral there,” said Rugburn, but the show moved on before trying to justify that ludicrous statement with some non-existent moral. At least she gave me one good tip though: use water and washing powder for washing. Genius!

In the end I don’t care if this couple's home is clean or dirty, which means the programme is a waste of time. People may watch it, but it’s still absolute arse.

At least it makes an effort to have fun, though, unlike You Are What You Eat (Channel, 8.30pm) starring pint-sized rodent-faced dictator Gillian McKeith. She collared a mother – Lisa Saunders – in the playground, berated her for the contents of her sons’ lunchboxes, and went back to their house to bark orders at the family.

The two sons weren’t impressed.

“She’s not even taller than me, and I’m twelve,” says the older boy.

“When she came in I thought she was evil,” adds his eight-year-old brother.

He’s got a point because McKeith clearly is evil. First she sent Lisa out to do a weekly shop. Then she threw away all their ‘nasty’ sugary food in front of the two boys and their portly father. And when Lisa struggled through the front door with the weekly shop, McKeith chucked most of that out too. Doesn’t she know there are people in Africa who want muffins? Unbelievable.

Then she whinged at them for all being too fat because they ate doughnuts and crisps instead of fruit and veg.

And after that the finally humiliation: McKeith made the family poo in Tupperware containers. How filthy! Let them do it in the toilet like everyone else. But they pooed in Tupperware containers so McKeith could analyse it. And after the cameras went off she probably took it home as a tasty snack, the rat-faced scatmuncher. Or maybe she dumped it in her garden to make a big poo sculpture of Adolf Hitler. Possibly.

Anyway, she made the family exercise and eat better, and in the end they were thinner and healthier. Ta dah! And that's it. It's rubbish. The fact that this is fast food TV is an irony that’s presumably lost on the programme makers.

But at the end there was an ad for people to take part in the next series. Oh, give me strength! It’s the same show every week. I hate uninspired series like these. I hate my TV for showing me them. But most of all I hate myself for watching them.

Ps. On an unreleated point, R.I.P. Steve Irwin.

2006-09-04T22:41:00.000+01:00

Fortunate to be annoying

Mark Lewis watches fate teach a peculiar lesson about the wisdom of whining

Last night Channel 4 taught us how a small group of people used up the combined luck of their families, their friends and every would-be lottery winner in New York when one woman’s whinging saved 14 lives.

"I was going to say: ‘God, if you get me out of here then I will never ask for anything ever again.’ But I thought no." Luckily Josephine Harris is not the sort of woman to ever give up the right to whinge, complain and ask God for anything she wanted.

In just the same way, Channel 4 will never give up the right to name its documentaries in the style of Catch Phrase, where Roy Walker sits a commissioning editor in front of a film and invites him to ‘say what you see.’

In this case it was 9/11: The Miracle of Stairway B (Channel 4, 9pm), where we learned the story of how Josephine’s endless complaining slowed the progress of 13 fire fighters as they fled the collapsing north tower on that day five years ago. She managed to get all the way down to the 4th floor before deciding she just couldn’t go any further.

Mostly this was pretty worn stuff. We saw the planes. We saw the jumpers. We saw the ordinary, brave, terrified firemen. We saw the gratuitous shots of burning towers and heard cod-portentious music. But this, at times was a touching story of how 14 people found the only place in the north tower which would protect them from the collapse of the 106 floors above.

The young people in Britain who attend the country's top universities might not be quite so lucky. But never has the educational gulf and snobbery of Britain’s higher education establishment been so cruelly exposed as it was on University Challenge last night (BBC2, 8.30pm). In the royal blue corner was fine old surgeon’s incubator, Imperial College of Medicine. In the dowdy, battered, brown corner was ex polytechnic and magnet for mature ne’er-do-wells, Brighton.

The bucks of Imperial whose youthful good looks smacked of many an hour spent in hilarious high jinks almost certainly involving traffic cones, would all grow up one day to become doctors. And , (oh cruelty of cruelties) two of the wizened old pub-quiz veterans of Brighton were studying to become nurses.

Chief wizened veteran was Thompson whose reluctant answers were eventually abutted by the classic Paxman refrain: ‘You always sound so miserable when you answer.’

Bright and knowledgeable, the Brighton team eventually won. You just hope they did not use up all their luck for te series.

2006-08-24T15:52:00.000+01:00

TV Will Eat Itself

Helen Parton finds plenty of food for thought on yesterday’s TV. Just avoid that yellow snow.

Rather like a gastronomic Coach Trip, Come Dine With Me (4:30pm, Channel 4) features just as odious a collection of characters but in a slightly less picturesque setting, unless you’re a particular fan of living rooms in the Midlands.

In the process, it does nonetheless go someway to sating the daytime TV viewer’s appetite as Countdown concludes and Richard and Judy await. For the uninitiated, five people (I think they’re strangers, but given the ructions between them, they quickly act like long lost friends)
cook for each other and rate each other’s dinner party and at the end of the week, one wins £1000.

Today it was the turn of Patsy, a jolly therapist who was determined to show off her West Indian cooking heritage. Tiger prawns, jerk chicken, ginger cake - so far, so yum. Her guests were Danny (nondescript Hollyoaks type good looking student); Kenny Rogers lookalike Graham, (according to Michelle that is, but presumably only if Kenny Rogers had fallen on hard times and was forced to play Phoenix Nights type working men’s clubs instead of crooning Islands in the Stream with my country and western aunt Dolly).

Michelle, another therapist, also caused huge offence to professional clown Julia when in the other day’s programme she rather astutely suggested Julia was barking and was using her humour and childlike demeanour to cover up a whole range of psychological ills. Politics and religion don’t even get a look in as conversational topics round this dinner table here.

This programme has attempted to steal different bits from the winning formulas of other shows – the bitchiness of the Weakest Link, the pointlessness of Deal or No Deal - and only succeeded in a corned beef hash of a show. The worst element is the double entendre laden voiceover, which makes the whole thing look like a low rent Terry and June. With no collapsing sunlounger gags in the title sequence either.

Bruce Parry and his team could have done with some Caribbean cuisine and weather to match in Blizzard: Race to The Pole (9pm, BBC2), an entirely pointless recreation of the Scott vs Amundsen race to the South Pole, but done in Greenland because, oh I forget, but it’s probably an equally tedious reason. Fresh from jumping over cows in Tribe, Parry returns with some intrepid pals to see how many fingers they can turn into frostbitten Alphabite-like stumps in some snow driven wasteland.

Unfortunately, just like Scott, they don’t pack enough food and underestimate how much weight they’ll lose, ditch their theodolite, an instrument I didn’t think existed outside of GCSE maths coursework, at a key moment, get lost and have to be airlifted out. Meanwhile the Norwegian team is miles ahead being pulled along by their trusty huskies, cracking jokes and chomping on biscuits and chocolate along the way. Sorry Bruce, but with that snack provision and your team taking a sh*t inside the tent, ‘cos it’s too cold outside, I know which group I’d rather have a tea break with.

2006-08-22T22:56:00.000+01:00

The Cookies

The biggest TV event of the summer (apart from the World Cup and Love Island) goes out like a damp firwork with David Cook's annual Big Brother awards...

And so, having gone on at least ten days too long, BigBrother dawdled onto its predictable, Pete-winning conclusion. And to mark this memorable summer in which we learned not to laugh at Tourettes sufferers (for abit) – and because the final wasn’t particularly remarkable, aside from Nikki’s nervous breakdown on exit (suspicious that she somehow rallied enough to go“Where’s my best bits?” though, eh?) - we present to you the BB 2007 awards. Cue half-hearted trumpet fanfare.

The ‘One That Should Have Won’ award goes to… Aisleyne
Not because she was edited unfairly (though she was), not because she seems like a really nice girl with, as your mum might say, a good head on her shoulders (though she does), but because Grace hated her. And any right-thinking person can see that the best way to decide anything is to do exactly the opposite of what Grace would like, because Grace is – and this is no exaggeration – the worst person who ever lived. Like, ever. Yes, worse than Sezer. And you don’t want to be like Grace, do you? Thought not.

The ‘Hardest Done By’ award goes to… Sam
Goes in. Is incredibly lovely to everyone. Gets turfed out on her ear for ‘being too nice’. That’s the sort of people that go onto BB, Sam. You were better off out of it.

The ‘Left Too Early’ award goes to… Shahbaz
Shahbaz had the potential to be the best BB housemate ever. Seriously. It was like Lorraine Kelly trapped in the body of a middle-aged gay Scotsman. The way he pounced on everybody as they arrived, cooing “Oooohhhh, you’re sooooo looooovely, aren’t you?”while stroking their hair like a lonely granny desperate for affection was classic TV, though admittedly probably terrifying for everyone on the receiving end. And what more genius response is thereto an argument about food rationing than empty the contents of the fridge into the garden overnight, thus condemning everyone to a week’s starvation? Come the day that BB decide to stick a contestant from a past series into a new house mid-run, it has to be the‘Baz.

The ‘Funniest Moment’ award goes to… Lea
No, really. Lea scoops the award for this followingexchange way back on the first night.
“Hi, Lea, I’m Sezer.”
“What, like the salad?”
Admittedly, that’s the joke we’d all have made as well. But having clearly expected to hear the words “what, like the emperor?”, the momentary look of anguish that passed over Ratboy’s face was the undisputed highlight of the series.

The ‘Why Do Channel 4 Keep Putting These People In?’ award goes to… Imogen
She just sat and stared into space. For twelve weeks! Every year there’s someone like this. For pity’s sake, C4, you could have put in anyone at all, and every single series there’s someone who’s the televisual equivalent of beige wallpaper. No more, please.

The ‘Fastest Metabolism’ award goes to… Glyn
Glyn did little other than eat (and fart) for thirteen weeks, yet when he left was even more pipe cleaner-esque than when he arrived. How in blazes did he do that? Give this man a diet segment on GMTV, pronto.

The ‘Chat-Up Line Of The Series’ award goes to… Spiral
“She’s got an arse like a loaf of bread and I just want a slice.” There’s some sort of genius in that, there really is.

And finally,

The ‘They’ll Understand In Court If YouStick A Knife In ‘Em’ award goes to…Grace
Or Nikki. Or Sezer, or Lisa or Mikey. Any reasonable jury would let you off. (NB: this is not a legal guarantee.)

2006-08-22T07:36:00.000+01:00

Religiously twisted

Mark Lewis finds a frightening tale of brainwashing and evil

Look, I’m as twisted as the next guy. I can think of nothing sweeter than starting a cult and fleecing my chump followers for all they’ve got. If they’re wealthy Hollywood chumps then all the better. Beard-sporting Polygamy is not for me, but give me the all the cash from your next – I don’t know – Mission Impossible movie and I’ll be off with Nicole Kidman in my spaceship faster than you can forget Look Who’s Talking. I mean, let’s face it, if a billion of this planet’s six billion people are wrong, then a certain 2006-year-old miracle worker is the finest cult leader of all time.

Even so, no matter how many times I watch the Monty Python Classic, I’m pretty sure Brian never advocates child abuse…

This is the starting point from where the comedy of cartoon cultism and real twisted religious exploitation depart.

Christianity has been implicated in horrendous betrayals: The widespread protection of paedophile priests leaves an indelible scar on the conscience of the Catholic church. But in Cutting Edge: Cult Killer (Monday, Channel 4, 9pm) we witness the most egregious abuse of Christianity possible.

The documentary opens with the suicide video diary of a terrifyingly matter-of-fact 30-year-old man. ‘I hope I don’t fuck up and blow my fucking nose off or something,’ he jokes while cradling a gun. Later, he will calmy take us through an assortment of tools he would use to torture an elderly lady: A hunting knife. A soldering iron. A drill.

The woman was a confidante of the man’s hated mother who knew, he believed, where he could find her. Two days after the video recording, he and the woman would both be dead.

His name is Rick. He has been raised as the heir to The Family. It is a cult founded by charismatic gospel preacher, David Berg (pictured), the terrifying limits of whose ‘free love’ philosophy we are given a clue to early on. ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘You all know what that means don’t you? Except the kids. And our kids are so smart even they know what it means.’

Rick was the ‘smartest’ of all. He was used as a tool to promote a 'new paradigm' of childhood sexuality. At five, he and his sister were encouraged to have sex with each other and the ageing Berg. The children were the stars of a book written by his mother, employing the chilling comic strip art still so beloved of right wing evangelists, only with sexually explicit images of children, rather than natural disasters smiting unbelievers. By 12 he was having sex with his own mother, Karen Zerby (one of Berg’s Hookers for Jesus and the current leader of the cult), and was the poster boy of what had become an institutionalised paedophile ring of hundreds.

Worst of all, it was all done in the name of Jesus.

By contrast, the men accused of wanting to attack planes bound for the US, in the name of Allah, seem almost tame. A typically sober account of the state of Muslim assimilation in Britain on Newsnight (every night, 10.30pm, BBC2) wasn’t nearly as sobering as the thought of all the terrible things done in the name of religion.